Its amazing to watch most pundits fall over themselves trying to come up with reasons as to why one more John McCain presidential run is floundering.  I figure that after all they've (ie. the MSM) invested in building up (St.) McCain's reputation as a "straight-shooter" and the principle voice of "bipartisanship" in the entire Congress through almost daily interviews with national media outlets, etc. that its a bit puzzling to them that nobody really likes him.  Oh people like "the idea" of John McCain, for sure, but the "real" McCain that shows up and that they see and listen to, ah, not so much.  Nevertheless, the pundits must make excuses for the disconnect, and one of the flimsiest that keeps coming up is that "McCain isn't really a politician at heart". One of the more ludicrious excuses along this line is the one Newsweek's Evan Thomas offered, "...it may be because he is not, at heart, a politician. He is a warrior." 

Classic.  First, am I to believe the man really wants to be president but he doesn't want to do all the things you need to do to be president and instead of asking if he's lazy or just really bad at running for president, we get excuses like he's "a warrior", not a politician? 

Second, John McCain has been a politician and member of Congress for a little over 25 years now, even longer if count the four years he spent as Navy liaison to the Senate.  By my count this is several years longer than his military career, so at what point can we stop referring to him as a "warrior" and start coming to terms with the fact he's just a politician.  Lord, I'm not going to even talk about how he divorced his first wife after having an affair with the current Mrs. McCain (20 yrs his junior)who happened to be the heir to one of the largest beer and liquor distribution fortunes in the country and all of it not long before he made his leap into politics running for an open House seat in her home state of Arizona because..... well, that's not too sporting is it?  The point is, someone with over 25 years of experience as a politician knows all the things that need to be done to stay a politician, especially the incessant need to raise money, so I'd suggest if Sen. McCain is really the man of integrity I've been reading about then he naturally should have quit the business a couple decades ago. 

It's a shame we have such a need to place the John McCain's of the world on a pedestal because invariably when it comes down to it they don't really measure up to our heightened expectations.  Perhaps we should take politicians, and make no mistakes McCain is a politician, and talk about them as they are and not how we wish them to be and maybe this need to make excuses for the distinguished Senator from Arizona's crappy campaign would go away.  Besides, he's a Senator and if memory serves every political commentator, reporter, and journalist I know says that Senator's can't get elected or make poor Presidents... then again, I think they only say that when we're talking about Democratic Senators running for president so I could be wrong?

I'm not a big fan of Hillary Clinton, but she is long on balls.

In her most dramatic statement on the Iraq war since officially entering the 2008 presidential race, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) called for ending the 2002 authorization resolution for the war.

Clinton joined with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), a leading war opponent, in offering a proposal to "sunset" the 2002 use-of-force resolution by Oct. 11, 2007, the fifth anniversary of the Senate vote allowing President Bush to take military action against Saddam Hussein. Under the Byrd-Clinton plan, Bush would then have to return to Congress to seek new authority to conduct the war.

Outflanking Obama on the left. He's still using the 2004 playbook that got him in the Senate.  This is a different time and a different place.

The only thing that Obama could do is vote for a more radical bill. Which he won't do. He's carrying Lieberman's mantle to defeat.

Edwards is durable however. He doesn't have to vote on the resolution. Gore will have to move up his timetable too.

And what will the summer bring? Congress will remain in session this time. The Democrats are planning to rule this town when Bush is in Crawford. The hearings will gavel on.

And look at the deauthorization date. Mid-October. This will pin every GOP candidate to the wall.

Her Maggie Thatcher moment. Even people who don't read the news will soon learn that Hillary is fighting George Bush.

And the Republicans? Three of their candidates don't believe in evolution.

The US military in Iraq announces it is clamping down on individual soldier blogs for security reasons on the same day it began advertising that it's public affairs division has started using Youtube to give the folks at home an "unfiltered perspective" on events in Iraq.  Officially "unfiltered" means showing anything that "does not compromise the security of its troops and operations, violate laws or include excessively gory, disturbing or offensive material", ie. anything that might make it abundantly clear how horrible war is. 

   Revelations no longer spur defense of Bush

This is the beginning of the end.

Looks like Alberto was insulating himself from the decisions in question:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides -- who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of eight U.S. attorneys -- extraordinary authority over the hiring and firing of most non-civil-service employees of the Justice Department.

I guess Alberto's claim that he knew nothing went wrong when he didn't know what happened starts to make sense now.

He would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids.

Yeah, we made up fantastic tales about the death of Pat Tillman and the heroism of Jessica Lynch, but you guys blew it for reporting it.

I highly recommend David Schorr's takedown of the "timelines mean they can wait us out" argument bandied about by those unable to rethink the quagmire they've aided and abetted.  As Schorr notes, the argument is irrelevant;

A lot of talk about "signals" lately. Signals to the enemy. Signals to the troops. Anyone who has read Sy Hersh's 1982 book on Kissinger, Nixon, and Vietnam, The Price of Power (out of print, unfortunately), should be extremely wary of military action as a communication medium. We should always ask whether the signal we're sending is the same one being received by the other side.

Force is sometimes necessary to achieve military, political, and strategic objectives. It can also be an effective complement to diplomacy. But in all these contexts, the connection to the desired aims must be specific and explicit, rather than general and vague. Once you adopt the demonstration of resolve as your aim, you have put yourself in a box and will have a hard time getting out.

Which brings me to the critique of a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. If we announce one, supposedly, our adversaries can just wait us out. Okaaaay... And if we leave it open-ended, they'll do what? Insurgencies are famous for being able to sustain themselves over long periods. I think we've got something backwards here. No matter how you slice it, the longer timeframe plays to the other side's advantage, not ours. Timeline or no timeline, either way the insurgents can wait us out. After all, they live there.

That's right Virginia, they can wait us out either way because gosh darn it they live there!  

Also, I think he correctly notes that over the long haul, time is on the side of the insurgency, not us.  For example, does anybody remember talking about Hezbollah before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982?  No, well that's because it didn't exist yet, however, it did grow out of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.  Iranian support and eighteen years of guerilla warfare against the IDF and its proxy, the South Lebanon Army, transformed Hezbollah into not merely an incredibly formidable military organization but a major new player in Lebanese politics.  

I'd also like to say, be it Joe Lieberman, the White House or General Petraeus, let's stop talking about Iraq almost exclusively in terms of Al-Qaeda.  They weren't there when we invaded but they're there now and frankly they want us to stay-- or was Osama Bin Laden merely spouting off when he said his main aim was to get the United States bogged down fighting a war in a Muslim Arab country in the Middle East?  True, they have a lot of money and spectacular suicide car-bombings make a lot of news but the main insurgent groups are overwhelmingly Iraqi Sunnis .  Furthermore, much like the Shiia of southern Lebanon of the mid 80's, over the last few years these groups have become very savvy guerilla fighters.  The reason we've long associated the insurgency with Al-Qaeda is not merely the White House's political need to conflate the invasion of Iraq with 9/11 but also, if Thomas Ricks is to be believed, because that the US military has long been able to monitor Al-Qaeda electronic communications in Iraq so they tended to attribute much of what happening to a very small number of foreign fighters.  In fact, one of the more interesting passages in Rick's book Fiasco is an intelligence briefing in 2005 where for the first time President Bush is told just that, that the war is not going well and we don't know much about the organization of the Sunni insurgency because its based on blood and tribal relations we can't infilitrate and don't understand.  Nevertheless, the intelligence officer describes how millions of dollars from exiles in Syria are being hand delivered to groups in places like Ramadi on a monthly basis. 

In the long run it doesn't matter if we say we'll leave next month, next year or a decade from now; the insurgents live there, they have their own agendas, we don't know a hell of a lot about them and at this point there seems no hope of the Iraqi government and parliament reaching any sort of political solution that will bring them back into a national debate not dominated by guns and bombings. 

Update (4/27/07):  I think I meant to say "can't recommend any more highly" but neglected to put in the "any more highly."  Oh well...

Somehow I knew this was coming, but one of the reasons US officials are saying that there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Baghdad is that they aren't counting all the people killed in car bombings.  Crazy I know, but then again if you check you'll find that they did the same thing during the last big "surge" operation in Baghdad during the Summer of 2006.  In short, we're still only counting the corpses dumped in the street and obviously killed execution style while hundreds more have been killed in car bombings.  Ah, progress.

From the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll:

On the question of how things are going in Iraq, 2 percent of those polled thought the war was going very well and 29 percent said somewhat well, for a total of 31 percent. Thirty percent said the war was going somewhat badly and 36 percent said it was going very badly, for a total of 66 percent. Among just Republicans, 62 percent thought the war was going very or somewhat well, compared to 36 percent who said somewhat or very badly.

Two Fucking Percent. That's within the margin of error. Maybe nobody thinks the war is going very well. Actually, I really can't see how they could think that.

Things are going to start moving really fast. Really fast. 

Now, here's the key: after all Congress's document and information requests to DOJ, the Justice Department had not revealed the Renzi-Charlton contact. For some reason, they've held that back.

The AP sources that to a House Judiciary Committee official and I've also confirmed with House Judiciary investigators that the DOJ failed to give this information to congressional investigators.

Where there is a cover up, there is something to cover up.

I meant to say something about General Petraeus' comparison of the bombing situation in Iraq with that of Northern Ireland during the 1970's and 80's but Kieran Healy beat me to it.  All I would add is the reason for the vast difference in the number of civilians killed (British troops, RUC and loyalist paramilitiaries were always targets) by bombings in Northern Ireland versus Iraq was that the main purpose of the various IRA bombing campaigns was to wreak havoc upon the physical and economic infrastructure of Northern Ireland, and later England, in the hopes that continued British control would become not only unpopular in England but way too expensive for the British government and the Exchequer to maintain.  The car bomb was the principle weapon of the IRA but terror by mass casualty was not their aim, as seen in the fact that by and large the authorities received phone warnings well before the bombs went off which is something we haven't seen yet in Iraq .  This is not to minimize the impact of the violence in Northern Ireland but merely to point out that in some ways it seems we're talking about apples and oranges.