Bush’s overkill going to war with Iraq was due to ambivalent reports and the knowledge that France was being bribed by oil for food money to remove the sanctions, something that could lead to WMD or another Iran war. It was not done because Bush was evil, but to make America safer.

Ditto for Homeland security. Yes, the TSA guards laugh when they search my husband after his rosary sets off the metal detector, but it is due to such searches that even more complicated ways of trying to place explosives on planes (eg shoe bombs, using peroxide to make a bomb in the toilet) are being tried.

Finally, one can even argue for torture and Gitmo.
About one third of those released from Gitmo have gone back to terrorism…and as for torture, it was torture that allowed the Philippine police to find out the plot to kill the Pope in the 1990’s and the plan of Alqaeda to bomb several airplanes or as an alternative to fly planes into buildings.

The fact that the CIA and the FBI failed to take the plot uncovered by Philippine security seriously may be another reason that Bush didn’t believe their benign interpretation of Iraq’s WMD….

Perhaps because I have lived in countries with civil war and terrorism that I take these things seriously.
There are bad guys out there, and dissing the good guys, even if they are hapless “keystone cops” at times, is not a game that I chose to play.