Discussing a Krauthammer column that basically tells us everything is just ducky in Iraq so long as Obama doesn’t screw it up, Sullivan writes:

The possibility, in short, that Iraq has lurched, via hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of American dollars, from an unstable, fractious tyranny hostile to Iran to an unstable, fractious, failed state friendly to Iran is a real one. The possibility that we are in a lull before another hot phase of a civil war that goes back centuries is an equally real one. To pretend that all is peachy, that the war is “all but over”, and that the practical impossibility of Obama being able to extract himself and us from the catastrophe of the Iraq occupation is proof of vindication for Bush is so cynical it’s jaw-dropping.

It’s an attempt to set up the president-elect so that the disaster Bush created can soon be blamed on the man who thought it was a bad idea in the first place. It’s of a piece with the looming Republican plan to assail Obama for massive spending after the GOP increased government spending for eight years at a pace not seen since the 1930s.

If these people had any shame, they might hold their peace. But we know at this point that the more shame is merited the less these people feel.