Democracy! Democracy! Democracy!

There is an old joke:

A man was looking all over underneath a streetlight.

Another man walked up to him and asked what he was doing.

"I'm looking for my contact lens."

"Okay, I'll help you." Looking at the ground, he noticed that the ground as very clean. "Oh, this should be easy, there isn't that much around for it to have gone under. You're lucky that you lost it here."

"Oh, no," said the first man. "I lost it across the street."

"Then why are you looking here?"

"The light is better."

This occurred to me today when listening to the Tony Snow Show on my radio. It strikes me that a lot of the neocons have essentially decided that holding the elections and capturing and trying Saddam are the only metrics for success in the War in Iraq.

He was repeating a recent criticism by Dick Durbin (I think, I'll provide a link if I find a good link to what he was talking about) that Iraq had less electricity than it had before the war, and less oil production before the war, etc. (I will admit that I am not certain whether this is true, I would need to study the issue a little more to actually endorse Dubin's statements, but here is a post from back in May 2005 discussing whether the claims that electrical capacity was constantly improving were supported by the numerical evidence)).

What is interesting is that Tony Snow did not even attempt to refute Durbin's claims. He just changed the subject to the constitution and to the trial of Saddam. "How can you say we failed when they voted on a constitution and when Saddam, the mass-murderer, is penned up in a cage?"

In other words, who cares about electiricity, oil production, etc.? We had an election! (I think I am paraphrasing a post by Lawrence Auster here, but I can't find it right now).

Hmm-mm.