You claim that we’ve achieved victory in Iraq. I’m sorry but victory in a war that never should’ve been waged in the first place is no victory at all. Our government made a mess, and now they’re scrambling to clean it up. Congratulations. But they maybe should’ve tried to not make a mess to begin with. Heroes don’t wage wars as distractions from our actual problems. They tackle problems head on, honestly, and with their hearts and minds on the people they’re defending.

@ Lisa – I love your article, and agree 100%.

Bush DID make several good decisions, and Bush HAS picked out a “Harvey Dent”, his name being General Petraeus.

News from Iraq is incredibly solid, we have caused a full retreat of Al-Qaeda from Iraq, when our troops come home, it will be in Victory, having completed all major objectives, and having brought peace and security to the region, which we had a moral obligation to the Iraqi people to do after toppling their government.

Had we followed the advice of some of the many cowards, we’d have packed up and left Iraq in shambles, coming home with our tails between our legs in abject humiliation, but thanks to Bush, who sacrificed his own popularity, his own personal position with so many people, we remained steadfast, and fought on to Victory, a condition which exists now.

Now the Iraqis are feeling secure enough to begin requesting our withdrawal, they’ll be left as a stable, secure country with an army not in shambles, not ripe for takeover by Iran, but retrained by the best fighting force in the world, and able to stand up for themselves, stabilizing the region, with unprecedented cooperation between factions who have been warring for millennia.

I didn’t say Bush was a popularity seeker – I implied that he was a clown (and really, who likes clowns anyway?), which is a metaphor extending beyond the boundaries of the Burton-verse Joker’s money tossing escapade.

“Bush-Hatred” is perfectly understandable. No president has been universally loved – they’ve all had their detractors. The difference now is that anyone with an internet connection and rudimentary typing skills can get a voice in the public arena. We’ve also been flooded with cable news networks that need 24-hour coverage of pundits talking smack about one politician or another. The hate has always been there- it’s just more visible now. (If you want a different view of the president, change the channel. Surely, there’s a point of view out there for you. Like Klavan’s)

The general public, the politicos, and the pundits who have made Bush-Hatred a phenomina which will earn itself it’s own chapters in the history books as a perplexing trend which will not ever really be fully understood. They are no different from the ones depicted in the movie, who understand very little and reject those who have the strength and endurance to carry on a fight which is the right thing, but unpopular to those who lack the ability to see the big picture.

I find amusing, and of course, disingenuous the places where no parallels CAN exist to refute the many, many, many parallels which DO exist between the Dark Knight, or the creation of parallels which do not exist to try to villify someone they don’t like so as not to appear as blinded by their own selfishness as those depicted in the movie. So, yeah, Batman picked Harvey Dent to be the face of the “Good Guy”, but what you so painstakingly leave out is, he picked THE WRONG GUY, Harvery turned into a psychopath who was going to kill a child for revenge were it not for the direct intervention of Batman. Batman hid his ugliest choices FROM the public, where the author of this article appears to demand that Bush publicize every decision. She seems to think that Bush is a popularity seeker, which CLEARLY he’s not, and even the absolutely laughable connection between the Joker of Burton’s Batman because they both “handed out money” without understanding the context of the stimulus package as a mechanism through which presidents are expected to deal with the economies of the nations which they preside over, whereas the Joker was a private citizen attempting to buy the loyalty of the masses against those who were charged with administering the duties of their governmental offices.

This “rebuttal” is a poor attempt at refuting what was a very bright observation on the part of Klavan, it failed and collapsed under it’s very own weight, and requires leaps in logic to follow which would make the great philosophers blush.

http://chud.com/articles/blogs/987/Some-Questions-I-Asked-Myself-While-Watching-quotThe-Dark-Knightquot.html