Newt Gingrich was on Fox today, talking about how the anti-Lieberman voters and by proxy, voters who are opposed to the war in Iraq, are an “insurgency.” It also appears that our ultimate goal is to “run and hide.”

You can watch him here. It will probably be only a few more weeks before the sons and daughters of Senator Joe McCarthy begin calling their political opponents “terrorists.”

Newt needs to learn that when you find yourself in a completely fucked up situation, the answer is not always to “stay the course.” The Titanic stayed the course and crashed into an iceberg, even after her captain received warnings of ice. I know, I know — lame analogy. But it holds. There are situations where doing the same thing — and in the case of Iraq, this means doing nothing, essentially — can lead to a catastrophic result.

Here’s the thing — everyone in America knows now that the rationale behind the war was bullshit. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq did not represent an imminent threat to the United States. So their efforts to paint dissenters as traitors and terrorist sympathisizers will fail. The only people left in the country who still cling to the lies are the Republican base — they’ve drunk the kool aid, and they’re already on the team. The rest of us in America — moderates, liberals, libertarians, traditional Repulicans, etc. — aren’t going to have our minds changed now because Newt Gingrich tries to link opposition to the war with the insurgency in Iraq. It’s not going to happen.

What we need to do is start asking a more important question: Why was the war in Iraq fought? What was the real reason?

There’s an answer out there somewhere. I only hope it takes the press, and not historians a century from now, to find it.

Robert Kagan, writing in the Washington Post, refers to Joe Lieberman, the embattled Connecticut “Democrat,” as the “last honest man” because of his refusal to recant on the Iraq War. Kagan writes:

Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn’t recant. He didn’t say he was wrong. He didn’t turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn’t claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn’t try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn’t claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn’t go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted “public intellectuals.”

No Robert, the problem isn’t that Lieberman didn’t recant — it’s that he’s wrong. He was wrong about the threat Saddam allegedly posed to America, he was wrong about weapons of mass destruction, and he is in complete denial about the Bush administration’s incompetence and policy failures. Lieberman isn’t being attacked because he’s “honest,” he’s being attacked because he provides bi-partisan coverage to an administration who has pushed our country off a cliff.

And I have to say that I’m sick of the argument that changing your mind and admitting fault is somehow “dishonest.” Get a grip, Mr. Kagan. There’s nothing dishonorable about admitting a mistake. The dishonorable thing is to continue trumpetting the administration’s line on Iraq when all the real world evidence suggests that the venture is failing, the country is in the midst of a sectarian civil war, and staying the course doesn’t seem to be having any effect on how things are going on the ground.