Noah Seton, on Peter Wehner:

President Bush’s opponents and critics are always whining about the “failure to take responsibility.” Isn’t the very act of recognizing that your previous policy is not working and changing both that policy and the personnel tasked with implementing it a form of “taking responsibility?” In particular, what President Bush demonstrated with the surge was that he still thought the outcome of Iraq – no matter how in doubt it was in January 2007 – was still his “responsibility” and that he would do everything in his power – even at extraordinary political cost – to rectify the errors that he had made. In my opinion, that is a much more tangible and instructive example of “taking responsibility” than all of the forced self-renunciations and completely hollow mea culpas that lesser public figures have engaged in.