This doesn't look like Kansas...

The CunningRealist tells us that Bush has pledged to help rebuild the Golden Mosque shrine and CR senses that this is another "Toto moment".

So this is what it's come to. Ponder it for a moment. We are now in the mosque-rebuilding business in the Middle East, smack-dab in the middle of a civil war. (And yes, it is a civil war. For the past week, the phrases "on the brink" and "possibly leading to" have preceded that term. Those waiting for an American style stand-up fight with skirmish line battles a la Antietam will be waiting for a long time.) We are asking 20-year olds from Tulsa and Des Moines and Gary and Fresno to navigate hundreds of years of religious and ethnic hate and to sacrifice their feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, and lives in the process. We asked them to remove Saddam and his regime, and they did that. We asked them to guard infrastructure, and they did that. We asked them to rebuild an entire nation's military from scratch, and they are doing it. We asked them to find WMD's, and they tried. Now, we're rebuilding mosques.

This is one of those "Toto Moments" when you realize how far from Kansas you've come, and you retrace the path in your mind wondering just how it happened. Soon, five years will have passed since 9/11. During those years, we've lost tens of thousands of troops to death and permanent injury by going "massive, things related and not, sweep it all up." We've spent hundreds of billions, with more to come. And after all of it, Bin Laden---as "marginalized" and "irrelevant" as ever---continues to urge attacks on oil facilities, the latest of which occurred this week at the crucial Abqaiq plant in Saudi Arabia.

And through it all we have a president who can only tell us to trust him because democracy takes time to develop and this is, after all, hard work. "Fret not, little doggies....in a few hundred years the history books will call me a genius." No. Just as patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, citing history's inevitable judgment is the last resort of an incompetent. It's a feckless and faith-based approach to leadership, and it's a cop out.