Why do these conservatives hate America???

The AP has a story today about a group of big-shot conservatives who meet on a regular basis in Washington, D.C.
Normally, I suppose, they just blow kisses at the Bush administration and so it is generally not very newsworthy. Plus the meetings are private and closed to the media. But this time the key speaker had some nasty things to say about the Bush team’s little misadventure in Iraq...

“Nearly 150 conservatives listened in silence recently as a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations ticked off a litany of missteps in Iraq by the Bush White House.
"This war is not going well," said Stefan Halper, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Reagan.
"It's costing us a lot of money, isolating us from our allies and friends," said Halper, who gave $1,000 to George W. Bush's campaign and more than $83,000 to other GOP causes in 2000. "This is not the cakewalk the neoconservatives predicted. We were not greeted with flowers in the streets."

Note the guy’s No.1 complaint: ”It’s costing us a lot of money!”

I guess only wimpy liberals complain about things like the deaths of more than 850 U.S. troops.

But this is the part of the story I liked the best...

“The marquee speaker sent by the administration was Eric Ciliberti, who spent several weeks in Iraq this year and told the audience of broad progress being made there.
Ciliberti complained to the group that those in the news media were not reporting the positive developments out of Iraq. Ciliberti did not return several calls late in the past week from a reporter seeking his account.”

So here is an administration official who will tell this group of privileged conservatives meeting in private all about the positive developments in Iraq but he won’t return phone calls from reporters seeking his account of events. And then he has the nerve to whine that the media is not reporting about the positive developments in Iraq. How typical.