At the Mises Institute’s conference on the presidency five years ago, Ralph Raico said that youngsters could be excused for believing that Bill Clinton simply must have been the worst president we had ever had. But in his brilliant dissection of Truman, Raico went on to note that a good knowledge of history can help us put such things into perspective.

Mindful, therefore, that I might be falling into a similar trap, I wonder if anyone else agrees with me that in this whole Iraq fiasco we’ve seen governmental stupidity of truly historic proportions. The whole thing is so surreal: how on earth, you wonder as you follow the news every day, can any non-comatose person not see through this constant barrage of propaganda?

I just wrote to a friend: “Now there have been bigger cons in the past, of course — the case of FDR and World War II comes to mind. Yet for some reason even that doesn’t strike me as being quite as aggressively stupid and pig-headed as the present regime’s behavior with regard to this war. Vietnam may have been a foolish idea, but I wonder if it ever seemed as downright _stupid_ as this war.

“The most recent American Conservative was very good on all this — the fanatics around Bush have deliberately closed off the possibility of a rapprochement with Syria, etc. How can these people be such unrelenting idiots? And why doesn’t every conservative in America protest at the constant insults to his intelligence?” Sadly, I think we all know the answer to that question.

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