The Democrats are running against George Bush and the Iraq war. To the extent that they succeed, it will largely be because of the president’s low job-approval numbers — which are at rock bottom mostly because voters can’t see that he is leading us in a new and “different kind of war, an insurgent war” against Islamic fascists. The last president to lead us “for the first time in a different kind of war” was President Harry Truman. The war was the Korean War, which started in the summer of 1950, and which was going badly that fall. “People thought at the time that the Korean War was a failure,” Mehlman said. “Now we look back and see that it was an incredibly important success.” It defined the Cold War, a war America won. ~Howard Fineman, MSNBC

Got that, kids?  Korea was “an incredibly important success.”  Never mind that the “important success” might never have happened had Dean Acheson not made a list of countries under our protection (forgetting to include South Korea–whoops!), or that the “important success” was only reasonably “successfully” concluded in a stalemate by Eisenhower.  Ike “cut and ran,” as it were, from a position of strength. 

But, no, pay no attention to that.  Bush is Truman, Korea is Iraq and we will win every bit as much as we won in Korea.  Say, how’s Kim Jong Il these days?

Fineman notes that this analogy is not a great one for the election:

But if Bush=Truman and Iraq=Korea, then the GOP is in for a drubbing next month. In the midterm elections of 1950, the president’s party, the Democrats, lost 29 House seats and six Senate seats. Eerily, those numbers are in the plausible upper reaches of the Beltway consensus about the amount of seats Republicans will lose on Nov. 7.