The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

Bush’s first term, quite frankly, broke liberals’ brains. Deeply fearful of being smeared as unpatriotic, prominent liberal commentators, politicians, and publications fell over themselves to back the White House’s Iraq War and wholesale evisceration of civil liberties. Funnily enough, this compromise didn’t work. Senator Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, was rewarded for his pro–Iraq War vote by getting called an Al Qaeda lover and losing his next election. Spooked by unexpected midterm losses in 2002, every establishment Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2004 also endorsed toppling Saddam. Howard Dean, a centrist triangulator from Vermont who likened himself to a moderate Republican in his own campaign book, emerged as the radical leftist candidate, because that’s how awful things were.