I read Wolcott for years, and always loved his stuff, so he’s been one more name to cross off the list, which is too bad.

I just followed the link to his blog, and I must say: I simply do not understand the Mind of the Elite.

For instance, this:

And Daily Kos alerts us to a Republican Congressman from North Carolina who says it’s time to start thinking about American withdrawal from Iraq.

So we are to understand that James Wolfcott has to go to Daily Kos to find out that ‘one’ Republican Congressman from North Carolina says it’s time to ‘think’ about withdrawing from Iraq?

Where has he been?

The entire ‘Republican elite’ has been thinking out loud about withdrawing from Iraq for months.

Thinking, talking, punditing, op-edding–you name it, they’ve been doing it.

How is it that I am able to know this, and James Wolcott is not?

Meanwhile we’ve been holding the Optimism Debates around here, too.

For my husband, Iraq is a debacle and a catastrophe, period. I don’t know if he’s escalated to ‘tragedy’ yet, as Michael O’Hanlon has done in his latest, but if he hasn’t, he’ll be there soon.

But the 2004 election, I discovered just this week, is not a debacle!

The 2004 election doesn’t tell us anything about anything: Bush won re-election by the smallest margin ever in the history of mankind, and besides, Americans don’t vote Presidents out in the middle of a war. So it was pre-ordained that of course Bush would win.

And that’s it!

No debacle!

Nothing to worry about at all!

No need to consider a ‘mid-course correction’ or two!

When I brought up James Carville’s assessment of the election (debacle), he said, “James Carville is emotional.”

OK, true.

Naturally I said, “So, if you’re willing to think the 2004 election wasn’t bad news for Democrats, why aren’t you willing to think that the outcome in Iraq could be in doubt?”

No dice.