You make plenty of sense. One point I'd like to underline: that trillion bucks we've borrowed and spent didn't get raked into a pile and set on fire. Most of it has gone into American pockets. The bullets, the Humvees, the M-16's, the Blackhawk helicopters -- all the materiel and support for our expeditionary force has been provided by American companies who pay their workers, and of course their CEOs, whose income for the most part is re-plowed into the American economy (except for some of those nifty foreign-made yachts and private jets). So the burden isn't just that we owe the Chinese a shitload of money. It's that our economy is at least partly held up by this spending and when it stops and we haven't educated our kids or refurbished our infrastructure or underwritten basic research or done all the myriad things the borrowed money could have been used for that would have enabled us comfortably to pay it back with interest, we're going to be a much lesser country than we were when we started.

Bush gets to dump this mess on his successor.

legislator with enough presence of mind to read Petraeus' words back to him today.

General Petraeus rebutted charges that he was merely doing the White House’s bidding. “I wrote this testimony myself,” he said. “It has not been cleared by nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or the Congress.”

Given everything that was said, as I remember BY the White House and the Pentagon, shouldn't this claim be investigated?

If these extra troops are what is making the difference, then how is taking them back out again going to help? On the one hand, "These things take time," and on the other, we can ramp back our presence to where it was not that long ago when things looked like total shit. Obviously, the administration wants to throw us a bone in the form of a promised drawdown (not that it ever really has to happen) so they and their supporters can claim that we're never satisfied no matter how courteously they accede to our demands. But putting it this way, Petraeus seems to me to be contradicting himself all in the same breath.

Look at the "embassy" that's been built in Baghdad. It's an enormous, fortress intended as a permanent occupying presence in Iraq, that by its hardened nature admits that we will not be welcome but plan to stay anyway. (We were never asked, as those footing the bill, if we wanted this bunker-on-steroids, but we got it.) Petraeus and Crocker get up there and talk about military progress and political progress but none of that means a goddam thing, because those aren't the things this occupation is about. They're overjoyed to be grilled on things like military and political progress instead of being ordered to explain what the hell that "embassy" is for and what the real intent of this invasion and occupation was and is.

At this moment, the WaPo's "most viewed articles" features Britney Spears' not-too-cool return to the stage at the top of the list, followed by "Petraeus leaves large questions unanswered." Hey, it made number two -- coulda been worse.

I support MoveOn and donated a hundred bucks toward the ad in question. That said, I do think they go for the shockandawe tactics that endear them to the converted but are off-putting to those who are wavering.

Martin Amis in today's London Times.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2424020.ece

NBC is owned by General Electric. TO me, that says it all. We can rail and rant and rave about the state of journalism, but until the major media are back in the hands of journalists, it's only going to keep getting worse. And it probably will, for a long time.

The MSM is essentially in Republican hands. Oh, they let their reporters and editors write think pieces and editorials decrying the incompetence of the Bush administration or allowing as how maybe tax cuts for the rich don't really trickle down. That gives good cover so they can whine about the Liberal Media. But media aren't liberal. NBC is owned by General Electric, for chrissakes. The overall slant, the choice of what stories to cover over time is determined by people who are in that upper crust that gets the tax breaks and makes money on war. So don't expect any great rush to call Rudy G. to accounts for who he really is, or to stop making hay out of $400 haircuts, if that's what it takes to keep Republicans in office.

The way I read it, we're barely into Fall now, so "next summer" basically means a year from now. Of course, they're not going to say that because people are so easily fooled by little semantic dodges, why should they? (Like pricing a car at $29,999.99 and calling it "the high twenties".) Besides, they have no intention of keeping this promise unless, come "next summer" they damn well feel like it.

"He is either going to go down in history as a disastrous flop or a really monumental president."

I vote for Really Monumental Disaster. When you "flop" people don't die.

They must've figured out how to put the Bush Kool-Aid into a mist and envelope Mr Draper in it during his interviews. Or maybe he's just sitting there thinking to himself, "Here I am, little Bobby Draper who never made the football team, sitting in the office of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!" and it was just too much for his cranio-neural circuits.

Way to go. I wish I'd of wrote that.

That came off snide. I was being silly (after dinner glass of wine), but meant it sincerely. Your post was a gem.