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There are few different answers to your thoughts.

1. Our opponents on the Left believe that they are so much better in solving life’s problems that anything, I mean ANYTHING, is acceptable for them to get their power back. As a result in their anti-Bushism they totally lost a big picture that many things we are trying to do in Iraq is exactly what they where advocating in opposition to “our SOB” policies and in their support for human rights, women rights, etc. This why they put themselves into a position that any success of Bush is a loss for them, everything else be damned.

2. Propaganda works. When the Left bombards people with the negative info and Bush administration does not even fight the info-war, they were able to persuade people that the Left’s biased view is indeed a fact.

3. It used to be that if you did not earn any enemies you did not do anything good. Now the mushy multi-culti thinking goes that if you have any enemies its all your fault. There are people in the world that I’d be appalled if they called me a friend, but Carterism wants to hug everybody. Its make some very useful idiots out of them. They call a view that evil and enemies exist simplistic. I think its more simplistic to think that evil and enemies don’t exist.

That does about sum it up, sadly. It isn't a problem exclusive to the Left to remember fondly how things were imagined instead of how they really were; we see it on the Right as well. One tends to accentuate those aspects of history that are most in congruence with one's theoretical models and it requires considerable discipline to recall and face firmly those that do not.

If, however, one carries this over to an appreciation of present conditions we get the currently skewed version of events in Iraq - they must be failing because that fits the Left's model; that things must be bad because the prerequisite to things working is the Left in power, and that things must have been better when they were and will be better when again they are. This is, actually, little more than a game of make-believe writ large.

That is one of the consequences of excessive partisanship. The real damage comes in when it requires historical revisionism to make the model work, such as the convenient amnesia concerning Democratic statements relating to Saddam Hussein's WMD programs. If one denies history in order to make the story - sorry, the "narrative" - straight one loses whatever chance one had of learning from it.

That is certainly taking place. Yesterday a young acquaintance asked me impassionately "What did Saddam ever do to threaten anyone?" and when I pointed out, "Well, he did invade Kuwait" the fellow looked at me quite earnestly and asked "When did he ever do that?" It didn't fit the model of ruthless U.S. imperialism that he had constructed in his head and he simply hadn't heard the abundant evidence to the contrary and didn't really want to. Serious dialogue with such individuals is simply impossible, which accounts for the degraded nature of political discourse these days. It is a pity that childish habit has been picked up by media editorial boards, but it is also a fact.