The Bitter Right

If, as seems likely, the Democrats win the next election and pursue a different strategy in the war on terror, will the conservative movement support a commander-in-chief under such circumstances? Victor Davis Hanson makes a veiled threat here:

All these Democrats now, for three or four years, have not just opposed George Bush, and not just opposed neoconservative idealism, but they've demonized it to such a degree that they've almost made Bush the equivalent of the enemy. And Bush has a lot of supporters in and out of the military. So now they think that they're elected, people like yourself and I are going to jump back up and say you know what? They're the president, we're going to support them at every opportunity. We probably will, but there’s going to be a lot of us who won't, because they're going to say they nitpicked, they were counterproductive, they wanted the people in Iraq fighting us to win. It's almost as if you burn down the house, and then you want to reoccupy it, or if you destroy the system of bipartisan dialogue, and then suddenly when you're president, you say let's restore bipartisan dialogue. But they've so demonized people on the conservative side of the aisle, that it's going to be very hard for them to create unity.

The insinuation - "Bush has a lot of supporters in and out of the military" - is repellent. But it's telling. If the pro-Bush right loses this debate over how to fight this war, do not expect them to be gracious losers. They could be even more vicious against a future Democratic president at war than the anti-war left has been to Bush.