“And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.”

No. They weren’t.

The flaw in his thinking is assuming that our only choice is to pick which of the two flavors of stupid we want to side with.

There’s a third choice — NOT STUPID. It’s not necessarily for or against the invasion of Iraq. At the time, NOT STUPID was asking, “Is invading Iraq stupid? Why does it need to happen? If it does need to happen is the Bush strategy stupid?” And so on.

But the protesters weren’t asking these questions. They simply marched and raged, “WAAAAAAAAAARRRRR BAAAAAAAAD!” without putting any thought into it. They were just the mirror image of the Bush supporters who raged, “WAAAAAAAAARRRRR GOOOOOOOOOOD!”

And the protest didn’t lead to the election of Obama. The shitstorm of incompetence that characterized the 8 years of the Bush administration from the top to the bottom did — Iraq, Katrina, credit crunch, real estate bubble, judicial nominees.

Drum circles didn’t get Obama elected. George W. Bush did.