Ode to Joy.

The Corner's Jason Steorts swoons over Pony Blow's oratory:

Tony Snow just spoke at a Hudson Institute event in New York. His topic: the Iraq War. He offered an omnibus argument in favor of staying, touching on moral and strategic points, as well as recent successes (cf. Anbar). Very persuasive, and very rousingly delivered. It is a mark of his oratorical skills that when somebody’s cell phone started playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” during the peroration, this sounded appropriate rather than absurd.

I think more appropriate would have been Die Walkure, but that's just me. But go on, Jason.

We can win in Iraq if we want to.

Weeeee! What a relief!

What happens in Iraq will change the world for a very long time to come; it is the most consequential strategic question of our generation, possibly our century.

This again. Then shouldn't we be sending more than an extra measly 20,000 troops? We've got troops in Japan, we've got 'em in Germany. Hell, we've got them in Hawaii. Shouldn't they all fighting the Battle of the Century?

We should be proud of an administration that is willing to lean against the winds of history for the sake of the right principles and policies.

Substitute "winds of history" for "the will of the American people" and that doesn't sounds so nice.

If we defeat al-Qaeda and establish something approximating democracy in Iraq, then the Islamist political alternative will have been publicly humiliated and refuted by counterexample.

Er, didn't Saddam represent a "political alternative" to the Islamists and therefore, wasn't he publicly humiliating them for decades? That doesn't seem to have discouraged them, does it?

Jason adds,

Snow can be mildly demagogic—as when, for example, he says that Democrats want to lose in Iraq (discounting the possibility that they believe we cannot win). But on the whole he is both thoughtful and persuasive.

Sometimes it really does feel like I'm making all this up, for my own personal amusement.