Non-partisan public service message from Johnnyblog:

About two weeks ago I wrote about Toby Keith and the way support for the war in Iraq in rural "red" states might be slipping.

The new polls (one here and one here, both via Joshua Marshall's lefty blog) seem to bear that out, kinda: A solid majority of Americans still support the invasion of Iraq, but a slim majority of Americans think Iraq and Afghanistan are not worth the $87b president is asking for.

Oh, crapbaskets. That's the worst combination I can think of.

People can disagree on whether we should have gone to the war mostly along political or philosophical lines. But now that we've blowed up Saddam's government, people can only really disagree on funding the reconstruction along IQ lines.

A majority of people seem to have been snookered (or snookered themselves) into the Iraq war with a Buy Now With No Money Down logic. They may have just wanted to put a boot in someone's ass a la Toby Keith and then leave, minus little more than the boot in question.

Don't be one of those people, OK? We all took a position before the war, but that really doesn't matter now. It's time to clean up the mess before the whole damn place turns into a terrorist state with pre-installed runways/state controlled media/homicidal wackjobs.

If you don't support the long expensive hands-on Iraqi reconstruction, then that puts you in the same camp as Richard Perle (and the French). You don't want to be like Richard Perle, do you? God, no. No one wants that. He looks like Robert Novak and Walter Mondale had a kid.