Max Boot goes to Iraq. He has been an ardent supporter of the war and tepidly supportive of the president. His findings, I think, reflect the difficulty with broad generalizations about the current state of Iraq. It's not as simple as "we're winning" or "quagmire". We're winning in some places and losing in others. It runs the gamut. Dana would have you believe that since Baghdad had more/more consistant power before the invasion, things are, therefore, worse. This is patent strawman and he knows it. He's not a dumb guy but he is a partisan. The production and distribution of power has many drivers. It's important to remember there was a war that, while brief and focused in scope, broke things. So, we had to fix the power supply before doing anything. Secondly, the grid is old and was poorly maintained. Many areas outside Baghdad didn't have power on anything approaching a regular basis. Now they do. That changes things dramatically. Al Qaeda has been attacking power substations periodically which also degrades consistancy. Consumption is also much higher than pre-invasion levels. Throw all these factors in the mix and the picture changes dramatically. Sorry for the tangent, but it speaks to my larger point that things aren't as cut an dried as either camp would have you believe.
That state of the DE blogosphere
I've been holding off on commenting on the imbroiglio over a posting at DelawareLiberal for Veteran's Day for several reasons. First and foremost is the situation at home (more on that later) but also because I wanted to get some distance from it to be sure I was seeing things clearly. I've been reading DV's stuff since before he joined Jason on his site and I've noticed a change in tone which seems to have accelerated of late. I enjoyed going to the old site because it was one the few places I could engage someone with different ideas than mine without things crashing headlong into Godwin's law within 3 posts. In short, DV acted in good faith and was rather deferential to his visitors which I greatly appreciated. Since pulling the old blog and posting on DelwareLiberal, I've noticed that ground has eroded rather quickly. I've never agreed with anything Jason posted but found him a book end to DelaThought's knee jerk partisan right wingery. Fi...
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