Much like in Stalin’s day, there’s nothing the left likes better than a nice purge.

Rep. Brian Baird’s (D-Wash.) recent conversion on the Iraq war is beginning to affect more than the national dialogue. On Wednesday, liberal group MoveOn.org announced an ad campaign against the congressman in his own district.

Baird recently returned from a trip to Iraq and reversed his position on a withdrawal timetable, citing military progress in the four-year-old war.

If they trusted the guy enough to vote for him, and are truly members of the reality based community, then why is it impossible that he went to Iraq, saw progress being made and changed his opinion on an immediate pullout based on that? Do they think when he got to Iraq they waterboarded him and brainwashed him into being a warmonger?

Anyway, I don’t plan to blog a lot about the war, if I can possibly avoid it. I knew going in that we’d be in Iraq for ten years minimum to be successful, and militarily and economically the US can keep this up as long as necessary. The only way the war can be lost is politically.

The usual suspects are doing their damnedest to make that happen though, I see the stickers on every telephone pole here in NY for the demonstration to “Stop the War” coming in September. Whenever I see one, I always wish I had some stickers to place over the word “Stop” to make them say “Lose the War”, because that’s really what they mean. They think a world in which racist, homophobic, theocratic, murdering fascists are triumphant would be a positive development. Of course, they think it’s the US soldiers that are the fascists, because flushing a Koran down a toilet, even if it didn’t really happen, is worse than, say, beheading an entire village, including women and children.

Anyway, the war is way too large of a topic to handle as an aside to one short blog post, but I’m sure it’ll come up again.