Shades of "premature antifascism": Ass-covering GOP whores own up to mistakes having been made, but what about everything they said before?

"Faced with almost daily reports of sectarian carnage in Iraq," Jonathan Weisman and Anushka Asthana write in today's Washington Post ("GOP Lawmakers Edge Away From Optimism on Iraq"), "congressional Republicans are shifting their message on the war from speaking optimistically of progress to acknowledging the difficulty of the mission and pointing up mistakes in planning and execution."

Well, sure, what would we expect? These are people who never had any idea what was going on in Iraq, and never gave a damn. Naturally their first (only?) impulse is to cover their asses.

Nevertheless. There is such a thing as reality, no matter what Karl Rove would have us believe.

Since I start my weekdays with Rachel Maddow on Air America Radio, and since she starts every day with news from Iraq—on the theory that we are, after all, fighting a war there—I take this personally.

From the start of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Bushlings have maintained a relentless drumbeat attack on anyone who tried to report what's actually happening there. For how many years have we had to listen to those contemptuous dismissals that the "liberal" media ignore "all the good news" from Iraq?

The reality, of course, is that, as Rachel points out frequently, the worse the news from Iraq gets, the less actual reporting of that news there is in this country. For better or worse, though, reality eventually catches up with fantasy. I don't know about you, but my blood begins to boil along about:

"First, Republicans are making it clear to constituents they do not agree with every decision the president has made on Iraq. Then they boil the argument down to two choices: staying and fighting or conceding defeat to a vicious enemy.

"The shift is subtle, but Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war."

No, I'm sorry, the shift is not subtle. Dishonest, yes, but subtle? No. Not to anyone who remembers the exterminating hatred with which the right-wing propaganda machine relentlessly assaulted the honesty and patriotism of people in the despised reality-based community who tried to find out and call attention to what the fuck was actually going on in Iraq.

It's just another mark of our imprisonment at the hands of a deeply psychoticized political Right, which thumbs its nose at reality and draws only on its ignorance, evil and, I have to say, insanity. I hark back once again to the reality that dawned gradually on David Brock, as he reported in Blinded by the Right: The present-day American Right isn't "conservative," and in fact doesn't have any political philosophy; it's just a venting of raw prejudice.

So if Christopher Shays and other Republican ass-coverers want to hide behind the "mistakes were made (but by somebody else)" defense, I'd like to see their sorry asses royally reamed.