Demagogue

President Bush spoke to the American Legion yesterday, and the audience was pretty receptive to his "stay the course" message regarding Iraq. Yet not everyone in the convention hall was eating up what he had to say:

The audience was not entirely supportive. Richard Witbart, a former schoolteacher and local official from Illinois who served in the Navy in World War II, said he believes the troops should be brought home and that the United States should not have invaded Iraq. "It just wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "We were not being attacked by Iraq."

I thought this comment by Bush was pretty lame:

[Bush] said that if the country gives up the fight in Baghdad, "we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities."

This is laughable. Al Qaeda will be marching up Connecticut Avenue in Washington unless we keep our troops in Iraq indefinitely? Such an argument doesn't speak well of the Bush administration's ability to protect America from domestic terrorist attacks.

It's a bizarre argument that an incremental withdrawal from Iraq would, by itself, suddenly turn our shores into a sieve.