NY Times columnist Tom Friedman, a/k/a the Mustache of Understanding set the entire context of the Bush era in this interview soon after the beginning of the Iraq War, which was always a great success!

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow?

Well Suck. On. This.

His very learned exhortation to “suck on this” was the Bush era in a nutshell as people who fancied themselves great thinkers, elites as it were, we’re only too happy to get down in the gutter with that (Harvard and Yale educated) Texan president that didn’t speak too good, but had a folksy common wisdom.  Yes, we were going to spread democracy at the end of a gun and it was going to be glorious, most days.  Of course, some days would be lesser glories, or even nightmares.  But that’s okay, it’s part of the process of imposing folksy wisdom on a population that have been undermined by the bigotry of low expectations.  Friedman and Bush understood that they were respecting the Iraqi people enough to believe that the end of the gun would just be an entry point.  The Iraqi people would embrace democracy and then thank us for pointing all those guns and bombs at them – like a slap in the face to a shell shocked soldier bringing them back to rationality.

And if you don’t like it, repeat after me:  well, suck… on… this!