In a post on Friday, Digby quotes a February 2005 New York Times article by Seymour Hersh:

Bush’s reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second guessing.

If there was ever any doubt that the Bush administration’s mind works in strangely asymmetric ways, here’s the proof. A wafer-thin election victory means a resounding mandate for the conduct of the Iraq war (what Digby calls “his 2% landslide”). They voted us in, therefore they support both the fact that we are at war and how the war has been conducted. So we are committed to staying in Iraq and there is to be no second guessing.

Then the American people change their minds on the war. Resoundingly. No wafer thin margins here. A solid majority join the ranks of the naysayers. Not even the neo-cons can now say – not even to themselves in their most self-deluded moments – that America supports the fact that we are at war and how the war has been conducted. But guess what? We are still committed to staying in Iraq and there will still be no second guessing.

It’s clear that policies are determined in a vacuum, and then immediately written in stone. When convenient facts (or “facts”) are at hand to justify the policies, they are trotted out and used as justification. When facts call the policies or their previous justifications into question, they are totally ignored. (And, of course, every effort is made to invent or discover “facts” that can be used to support the policies.)

And, the shame of it is that we have no one to blame. This is what we wrought ourselves when, after all the evidence of the first four years, we signed up for four more. Now there’s only one choice: to grin and bear it. Because impeachment’s impossibly unthinkable. And resignation’s hardly his style.