I am going to lean on the New York Times a bit here (completely out of character, I know). Thomas Friedman started off an op-ed last week with some funny (you might say morbidly funny) comments on how you could start to fill a bookshelf with the burgeoning section of "how the Bush administration has screwed up" titles. Things seem to be -- hopefully -- pointing in the way of Democratic victory in at least one of the branches of Congress, which if it happens, might start to rein in some of the Republican groupthink that has been going on in Washington for the past six years. Today David Sanger comments on how the decision to focus on Iraq has shown yet again to be a mistake, as North Korea claims to have tested a nuclear bomb and there isn't much of anything we can do about it. Three years ago we threw our lot in with the merely bad, and really haven't paid enough attention to the definitely worse.

I guess you could claim a lot of this is the 20/20 of hindsight, but I would definitely argue that there were some bad decisions based on some bad policies and the ideological (instead of realistic) visions of how certain things would play out.