“If we can say nothing else, at least we can say “I told you so!”

A plea for public gloating by Brian Hollister Davis, webmaster of godhatesrepublicans.org.



Like most people who never voted for President Bush, I have one particular part of his 2006 State of the Union address that bothered me the most. For me, it was the following section.



“In the coming year, I will continue to reach out and seek your good advice. Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy. With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor.” (For the text of the complete speech so you can find your “most annoying section”, I suggest http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/31/se.01.html)



Why did this part bother me so much more than any other part? It’s the arrogance of the “Hindsight is not wisdom” crack at me and the millions of people who have ALWAYS said that invading Iraq was a stupid, obvious mistake. Like many millions of other people around the world, I wrote letters to newspapers, marched, called my Senators and Congressmen, everything I could think of to prevent this disaster.



Three years ago, Bush gave a typically inarticulate brush-off to those of us who thought his policies were, to be blunt, mind-bendingly stupid.


George W. Bush said on February 18, 2003, “First of all, you know, size of protests--it's like deciding, `Well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.' The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon, in this case, the security of the people.” To hear it in his own words, I suggest you go to http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcript...218.gonyea.html.



How dare anyone, least of all this idiot boy-King, accuse us of indulging in hindsight and second-guessing? We were against this idiocy from Day One! We were right; they were wrong. Case closed!



I don’t know if the damage to America’s standing in the world can be fixed at this point, but I doubt it. I also doubt that the damage done to America’s economy, the planet’s environment or even our national psyche by five years of Republican mismanagement can be fixed in our time.



We should try, but short of a second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt I’m not optimistic.



But when there’s nothing else that can be said, there is always one thing you can say that can restore a certain satisfaction to a horrible situation. That is, “WE TOLD YOU SO.”



Arise, fellow Progressives, Liberals, Greens and all the others who have been against the Insane-Republican, Neo-Conservative agenda since day one, and say with one voice, “WE TOLD YOU SO!!!”



In this spirit, I recently started http://www.WeToldYouSo.org to distribute bumper stickers proclaiming to the rest of the world “We Told You So.” I’ll also be displaying pictures of those who want to send me photos of their stickers on their cars, or anywhere they wish to put them.



We’ve all been against this rising tide of borderline-Fascism since the beginning, and we should be upfront about it. And at the very least, we’ll all feel a little better for proclaiming it.



Brian Hollister Davis is the webmaster and primary author of http://www.godhatesrepublicans.org.



Please feel free to forward this email to friends, family, blogs, mailing lists, newsgroups and media figures. Help spread the word that WE TOLD YOU SO!!!