Eh, I don’t buy that, although something like the reverse might be true. If Bush had managed the war competently and Iraq was reasonably secure now, he might have had the political capital needed to ram the shamnesty through. It’s the war that eroded his credibility, not immigration. To the extent that she’s saying the debacle last month won’t do him any favors in trying to rally conservatives to sustain the surge now, she’s certainly right, but wouldn’t that have been true if instead of immigration he had taken a contrarian line on, say, abortion?

As for her answer to O’Reilly’s question of whether he and she were right to have supported the war in the first place, I honestly don’t follow her. She ends up connecting it to the fact that there haven’t been any attacks here, which is true but hard to connect causally to the war. Who knows what any jihadis would have done or where they’d have gone if they didn’t have their eye on Baghdad? She actually starts off by saying that they were right to support the war because if we withdraw now it’ll embolden Al Qaeda, but of course that doesn’t answer Bill’s question at all. I don’t know — I like the idea of her yelling at Bush during their bike ride, in any case.

Here’s an argument from TCS that might give O’Reilly some comfort.