War & Peace Quote by Alan Colmes

Colmes opens by pretending to grant George W. Bush an absurd trifecta - “genius, scholar, and war hero” - then swivels the knife with “though he is,” a hinge that turns praise into parody. The comedy is in the overstatement: Bush’s public image was never that of an intellectual virtuoso, and calling him a “war hero” in the context of starting a war invites the reader to feel the irony before Colmes ever names a policy failure. It’s a classic late-era cable-news move: use a wink to smuggle a critique past partisan reflexes.

The real target isn’t just the Iraq invasion; it’s the culture of deference that surrounded it. “You have to admit - or maybe you should think about admitting” stages an argument with an imagined audience that won’t concede the obvious. Colmes is mocking the rhetorical stalemate of the time, when the run-up to Iraq was defended with certainty, patriotism, and a lot of impatient TV confidence. By lowering the claim to “might have rushed things a little,” he mimics the euphemism of media understatement: a catastrophic strategic decision reframed as a mild scheduling error. That minimization is the point. It exposes how public discourse can sand down moral and geopolitical stakes into something palatable for viewers who want to keep their team “right.”

It works because the line performs the very denial it condemns: the sentence keeps backing away even as it advances, illustrating how hard it was, politically and psychologically, to say plainly what many suspected about Iraq in real time.