When I spoke about despair, Andy, it was tone more than substance I was referring to — because despair is an attitude, of course, not a philosophy. You may not quite realize how you sounded or came off in your initial posts, but I don’t think I was misreading you. To say you are holding the president to his own words is fine, but I think you’re really holding him to your interpretation of what his words require rather than the words themselves.

Oh, and on the matter of all those nickels I’d get from neocons convinced we were losing? A lot of them would have come from that other Podhoretz…