Why do Progressives object to progress?
The lovely Michelle Malkin gets a tip of the hat for pointing out this posting on Decision ‘08. They look at the ten most amusing/ most pathetic reactions from commenters on The Daily Kos (a high-traffic liberal website) to the Iraqi elections.
My personal favorite was actually all the way down at Number 10:
…[I]t’s precisely what BushCo is trying to do. Distract us from the violence and the deaths, of both U.S. and coalition forces and the Iraqi people, by staging these elections and giving us these photo ops.
After listing (and linking) the top ten most pathetic responses, Mark Coffey(Decision ’08’s site owner) wrote:
Those of you who think I am shooting fish in a barrel with this occasional feature: you’re right. Those who think I use it to tar all liberals: you’re wrong. There is one particular species known as the ‘progressive’ that I am taking aim at.
Maybe the distinction between “progressives” and “liberals” is too fine a one for me, and I am uncertain how Mr. Coffey divides them, so I’ll leave that part alone.
But what Mr Coffey has done is to point out one of the real problems the left faces: by wrapping up their hatred of President Bush and the Iraq war into one big bundle, they blind themselves to signs of progress and find themselves actually wishing for failure. After all, what happens if a free and reasonably democratic Iraq is established?
Well, it means that President Bush was right, and his policies have been vindicated.
And where does that leave the left? The temptation is to answer with a quip, “Out in left field,” but there’s more to it than that. By wrapping up everything into Iraq and their hatred for President Bush, a success in Iraq leaves the left with nothing; they have put all of their eggs into one basket, so to speak, and if the basket drops, all of their eggs are going to break.
The left (and the Democrats) are looking to the November 2006 congressional elections. (Mr. Coffey has an article concerning John Kerry’s statement that if the Democrats take the House in the 2006 elections, President Bush could be impeached.) But if the situation in Iraq is stabilized, if we are clearly winning in Iraq by November of 2006 (and we are clearly winning now, but the left won’t admit it and too many elements of the media won’t cover it), a left and Democratic Party which has based their entire strategy on an Iraq in chaos is sunk, done for, cannot win.
Free elections are, quite obviously, evidence that the war in Iraq is being won. In the first elections, for the interim government, under threats of death by the insurgents, Iraqis turned out to vote in percentages that rivaled our own. Now, with the new constitution written and approved, Iraqis have apparently voted in much higher percentages than before, with solid turnouts in the Sunni areas that had previously been low.
Which brings us to the seventh most pathetic comment, written by a guy who styles himself, probably more appropriately than he realizes, the Yellow Canary:
The paradigm I operate under is that the forces Bush has marshaled to allow him to use my money to terrorize a foreign population and get American soldiers killed and maimed are the exact same ones which are staging the election and will oversee not only the results but the actions of the elected.
Mr. Canary wouldn’t believe any good news out of Iraq, because it doesn’t fit within his paradigm; to him, all good news is bad news, and all bad news is good news. In his own way, he has defined for us the problem that faces much of the left and the Democratic Party: they win only if we suffer a disaster in Iraq.
Update, to answer LA’s question: 
Yeah.
The Liberal Avenger:
Michelle Malkin - lovely?
17 December 2005, 12:51 pmJohn:
She’s a babe.
4 January 2006, 8:53 pmOnline Roulette:
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23 January 2007, 11:58 pmblubonnet:
I’m trying to find one thing that this Republican run government has done that hasn’t been a total full blown disaster causing dead bodies to mount, and not just in Iraq, he’s destroying every f**king thing he touches…EVERYTHING!
17 April 2007, 1:45 amblubonnet:
I’d like to find one thing that has been done, that has been genuine, and honest. There literally is nothing. It’s all theatre, and siphoning the public treasury, for himself and his war invested buddies, with blood as the cost to humanity. That is the ugly truth. Such is the heart of a war profiteer, as foul as the stench of rotting meat.
17 April 2007, 1:50 am