The Two Minutes of Hate.

It’s both fascinating and entertaining to watch Putz, along with his buddy Hugh Hewitt, point and scream at conservatives who are criticizing the war.

The "180s." I agree with Hugh Hewitt that Bush ought to reach out to war supporters who now disdain him. But I think that a lot of the flipflopping is from people who feel that they have to attack Bush and the war now in order to protect their standing in the journalistic or foreign-policy establishments, so I don't know how well it will work.

So to Putz, conservative war critics do not have any valid arguments about Bush and Rumsfeld’s prosecution of the war worthy of a response. They simply cannot, because the war is, ipso facto, just and good, as is Bush. Andrew Sullivan, George Will, William F. Buckley, and George Djerejian --- all unprincipled, spineless Bush-haters, defeatists, “180s”, flip-floppers, interested only in preserving their journalistic street-cred, and lashing out because they feel “embittered” and “disdained.”

It’s pathetic, but this is really all Putz can do, since even Republican congressmen are finally conceding that the “Iraq is going well, the media is just distorting the news” lie is no longer credible, the objective metrics of the war are getting worse every day, two-thirds of the American people think Iraq is a disaster, and Iraqi leaders keep saying the darndest things.

I suppose Sullivan, Will, and GD got off easy, in a way. Since they’re conservatives, they aren’t getting smeared as “traitors” or “a disgrace” or “pro-terrorist” as their liberal counterparts are regularly by this group.

Still, you’d think a law professor at a prestigious state university could do better than Karl Rove’s tired, attack-the-messenger playbook.