Message: Stay Home!

Freddy goes on to say: "Yes, the Republican performance in the last two years has been disappointing. The Iraq war isn't going well. President Bush and the Republican Congress have spent too much of the taxpayer's money. They got nowhere on overhauling Social Security and only part of the way--beefed-up border security--on immigration reform. The list goes on. Still, the reasons given for staying home on Election Day are pathetically disconnected from the realities of politics and political power.

"The president and Republicans need to be taught a lesson: We hear that a lot from conservatives. And maybe Bush and company do. But allowing Democrats to take over Congress won't achieve that. It won't lead to a Republican course correction any more than losing the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections taught Democrats to move to the right. Politics doesn't work that way, and it never has. Losing simply hurts a political party. A landslide loss in 2006 would merely weaken the Republican party."

Other conservatives, meanwhile, continue jumping off the Iraq bandwagon. National Review's Jonah Goldberg is the latest. He doesn't bury the lead:

"The Iraq wa[r] was a mistake.

"I know, I know. But I've never said it before. And I don't enjoy saying it now. I'm sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that's fine because I'm not joining their ranks anyway.In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests).

"I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known -- or what was believed to have been known -- in 2003. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing."

Jonah says Iraqis should vote on the continued presence of U.S. troops:

"If Iraqis voted 'stay,' we'd have a mandate to do what's necessary to win, and our ideals would be reaffirmed. If they voted 'go,' our values would also be reaffirmed, and we could leave with honor." Although the place would still be a bloody mess.

A non-conservative, blogger Jeff Jarvis , does his own mea culpa:

"I had separated intent of the war from its execution. In 2003, I believed the intent was proper. I followed a path that Tom Friedman has since abandoned if not recanted: that this war was not and should not have been about WMDs but was instead about bringing freedom, democracy, and opportunity to a part of the world whose primary export is becoming anger. Not unlike Peter Beinart, I saw a liberal justification to the war: antitotalitarianism, freeing people from tyranny, supporting freedom and choice, as well as coming to rescue the people we had abandoned in the first Iraq war and its aftermath. I saw a humanitarian cause.

"But the execution, I saw too late after our "victory," was hopeless and shameful. And, of course, it has only gotten worse as it has gotten more stubborn...

"So which do I regret? The war or its execution? I fear it doesn't matter anymore. Wishing and what-iffing that things had been done differently does no good for the people who have lost their lives there."