Count the False Premises
By Duss notes that the final paragraph of this Jennifer Rubin post is “one of the dumbest things you will read this year.” And, indeed, it’s a beauty, attributing the uprising in Tunisia to the non-existent “secular democracy” in Iraq:
The left blogosphere seems to have wigged out over the suggestion that George W. Bush and the successful [sic] emergence of a secular [sic], democratic [sic] Iraq has anything to do with all this. For starters, it is amusing to see that those voices, fresh from the smear on conservatives regarding the Arizona shooting, are now all about “causation.” [!] But more seriously, had democracy failed in Iraq, had the country descended into chaos, and had Iraqis laboring for a secular, democratic Muslim country been killed and exiled, do we imagine this would have been good for the prospects of democracy elsewhere? [Impressive goalpost shifting from one sentence to the next there.] Recall that it was the left that said that democracy was alien to the Middle East. [cites please] Bush was right; they were wrong.
Really, this nonsense was put forward more succinctly many years ago.