Without resorting to polls or research, I can’t be sure of this, of course, but I have acquired of late a general sense that the political winds in this country are changing. Perhaps it’s because of columns like Eliot Cohen’s in The Washington Post over the weekend—one of the surprises of which was, as Atrios pointed out, that it seems like the best reason for not going to war in Iraq is turning out to have been, for many non-fundamentalist conservatives, that the people in charge weren’t competent to deal with life after the invasion. (And so they can rescue the general principle--that it was right to go to war--from the fact of its incredibly shoddy execution.)

Of course at some level my sense that things are changing may simply reflect a growing optimism in me. I last felt this a week or so before last year’s presidential election, and we know how that turned out.