Dowd is clearly in over her head when she tries to advise the administration on military strategy. "The president should ... put down the bullhorn and tell Rummy to get moving," she recently declaimed. "We've been trying to use the Northern Alliance to lure the Taliban out of holes ... These proxies who smoke and complain more than they fight, can help. But they are not the key to victory." That was then, of course.

When she wasn't playing general, she was sweating through Vietnam flashbacks: "After one of the worst weeks in the capital's history, filled with federal confusion and deadly missteps, the question was suspended like a spore in the autumn air: Are we quagmiring ourselves again?"

Of course, we're doing nothing of the kind. But hysterical naysayers like Dowd can't seem to let that fact stand between them and another chance to jab the usurping, bumbling president who, after the recount of all recounts, turns out to have won the election fair and square; and who has moved largely unscathed through probably the most apocalyptic first 300 days that any American president has ever faced. His approval ratings are in the stratosphere, and whatever else you can say about him, he hasn't dropped the ball or run the wrong way on the field.

And there's another upside to this. In a piece by David Rohde, the Times reported that this bombing "appears, in general, to have hit its targets -- military bases and government complexes within walled compounds. There was little visible evidence today on city streets of buildings damaged by American bombing."

So why can't the rest of the booers and doubters bring themselves to praise a job at least competently if not downright well done? Is it embarrassment? Certainly they, like nearly every journalist who has written about the variegated shakedown of the last two months, must have felt compelled to venture their opinions in the dark, to take stabs at coherence in an incoherent time. Perhaps acknowledging that some or most of those hard prophesies were wrong would only more boldly underscore the insecurity under which they, and the rest of us, are laboring. It's not their job not to know. Or to admit it anyway.

Then, of course, there are the peaceniks and other "war isn't the answer" peddlers. Granting that we've, at least in part, succeeded in Afghanistan would mean accepting the value of necessary force, thereby negating their raison d'etre. Better to stay the complainant course, wait for entropy to do its inevitable work, and then chime in with a robust "I told you so."

Finally, there is purposeful kicking. No doubt for some of the upstaged anarchist crowd, who've been twiddling their thumbs enviously since Genoa, negativity is a strategy, designed precisely to weaken resolve and support for the war -- something my fellow columnist David Horowitz argued played a significant part in our longitudinal failure in Vietnam. Besides, as Osama bin Laden knows all too well, its always easier to raze than to build, to cavil than to roll up your sleeves.

Whatever the reason, the war worriers keep finding any and all excuses to malign U.S. foreign and military policies -- even when they are stunning successes. Such is the nature of the game the ruling impresario press is always playing. In one way or another, its livelihood depends on it.

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