I’ve not read this study in any detail, so I can’t comment on it beyond what I confess is a skim-over. Scott McLemee’s take is probably about right; indeed, the argument seems rather banal: to sum up, essentially, the “anti-war movement” of the last decade dried up because Obama won the presidency, even though Obama has a less than impressive a record when it comes to ending wars.

Well, sure. Democratic voters tend to wanly hope that Democratic politicians will do what their elected representatives will do what they were elected to do, though they know better, deep down. After all they have to worry about their jobs, or lack of same, in a crap economy. And Obama has probably done sort of just enough to keep people from continuing to be pissed off about the wars, though starting a new one is probably pushing it kinda.

Essentially the study seems to be saying that most Americans vaguely expect, or pray, that representative democracy is not nowadays an absolute sham, or else they just drink to forget that, yeah, it is, mostly.

The study doesn’t seem to be suggesting that the reason most of us farther to the left than Joe Lieberman (more than half the country!) thought that the Iraq war in particular was a horrible idea was because it was George W. Bush’s idea. Why, you’d have to be a complete twit to misread the study to get that idea…

Oh hello, Instatwit.

Yeah, it’s as if all that self-righteous moralism, and cries or war criminal and illegal wars and concentration camps at Gitmo was just a lot of lying, self-serving twaddle by people who really just wanted power for their team. Who knew?

Well, some of us did. And pointed it out at the time. And, well, we’re going to keep rubbing it in now.

Hang on until I tell you where to rub it, putz.

If Obama had been the Democrat Democrats wanted elected, well, we’d have a representative democracy, dammit.

But we don’t, so, sláinte.