I’ve read Cold Fury for a while, and only through boneheaded oversight haven’t put a link to him up. I’ll fix that this weekend.
Found this today, in response to the Asparagirl hooha. Go read the rest, it’s great.

No matter how Churchill might have felt in his darker private moments during WW2, he never gave in to the kind of defeatism implicit in Jeff’s reading of Brooke’s post. If he ever even expressed the smallest navel-gazing doubt, I’ve never heard about it. Maybe my knowledge of the man isn’t what it should be, but it seems to me the free world needs all the Churchills it can get; it always does, but especially now. There are quite enough doomsayers out there on the left side of the political equation, and they neither need nor deserve any encouragement from the rest of us. They can’t be allowed to win the day, because if they win, all of us lose. ALL of us.
The great conflict of our age will be resolved. Whether it will be resolved in a way favorable to freedom and the advancement of the human spirit or to repression and religious despotism will be decided by our own resolve both as a nation and as individuals. In fact, in the end they’re one and the same thing. Those of us who truly believe in freedom must not give up. It’s that simple. If our leaders lose sight of the objective, they must be brought back around or they must be replaced. The leaders must themselves occasionally be led.
The last few months have been especially frustrating, with Bush failing to adequately support Israel as they fight what we all know is the same war he once seemed so committed to. There have been a few encouraging signs of life lately, although not near enough yet, as far as I’m concerned. The rest of the world condemns every reflexive move Israel makes if such moves threaten to make the enemies of freedom, whether in Ramallah or Jenin or Riyadh or Damascus or Cairo, slightly uncomfortable. A great many opinion-shapers and world leaders appear to be wearing some sort of strange blinders which allow them to see fault only on Israel’s side and enabling them to ignore the most elementary lessons of history. The idea of a Palestinian state has become something of a fait accompli in certain quarters, without regard to what form such a state might take, the effect it might have on Israeli security, and even whether such a thing is historically justified or not.
And meanwhile, not just coincidentally but as a result, the suicide-murderers have continued to wreak their bloody havoc. The people who put these simple-minded dupes up to their despicable acts are not stupid; in fact, they are descended from a line of Machiavellian tribal despots stretching far back into human history who know how to manipulate events and gullible people and who have no moral strictures against using any means whatsoever to hold onto power. Dishonesty is merely another tool of statecraft for them. They know that there are some fools in the world who, whether motivated by pity or something more sinister, will want to buy the particular brand of snake-oil they’re selling. And as long as that remains the case, they’ll keep right on peddling it. It’s their only hope.
But I think their hope might just be fading. Call me a Pollyanna if you like (yeah right), but I’m beginning to feel in my gut that the more astute among the Arab world know the tide is turning against them and their phony concern for the “rights” of the Palestinians. I don’t have anything to back that up with, but I feel that way just the same. With each new round of outrages the Palestinians lose a little more sympathy, because each time the veil of lies their leaders hide behind is lifted a little higher, and sympathy is what they absolutely must have to continue to survive. It’s the one thing they cannot live without. It’s hard to claim to occupy the moral high ground when you’re murdering children, and it’s even harder to maintain the illusion that you care about morality at all when the world sees you murdering children every damned day.
So we all need to hold onto that anger. Losing our sense of outrage over, well, outrageous acts is not something we can afford to do. Not now, not ever. Because as long as we still have the capacity for outrage, we can still win this war.

I had hopes that GW had some Churchill in him, at the State of the Union Address back then. I stopped calling him “shrub”, and everything. I’m still hoping, but I’m an optimistic bastard by nature. For a while, anyway.