How to fail in Iraq without really trying

Colorado Pols, for some reason, thinks Ken Salazar was a bipartisan genius for trying to put the Iraq Study Group recommendations into law. The theory being that Ken's proposal will allow enough cover for senators to vote for the ISG's recommendations as a way to pressure Bush on Iraq.

I don't fault Ken's attempt to get something done. But there's a couple of problems with his the the Pols' presumptions: First, Bush firmly rejected the ISG's proposals even as all of Washington said he would have no choice but to implement them. So much for conventional wisdom. Second, we now see that a full court press press, a round of deceitful, slanderous trips to Baghdad for easily manipulated lawmakers, and further commitment by Bush to turn this mess over to the next president is the unstoppable, unspoken goal of the President's final days.

Rick Perlstein lays out what easy marks the Dems are in falling for Bush's rhetoric once again:

In the world of the Big Con, often the easiest marks are Democratic elected officials.

Supposed liberals, like my own senator, Illinois's Dick Durbin, pronounce themselves inclined to support the President's $197 billion supplemental request for Iraq funding—the one in which he tacked on an extra $50 billion at the last minute, perhaps just to prove that he could. Durbin said he would be for it in the same breadth as he noted to the Chicago Tribune that the request "seems likely to prolong troop levels at their current elevated number into the spring of 2008."

In other words, he's objectively pro-surge, and this even before the made-up report that's supposed to prove "progress."

I can't believe what suckers these senators be. How hard was it to spot that the "surge" was a put-up job from the start? How hard was it to imagine the White House marketing meetings in which it was concocted? It's not even sophisticated hustling. "Hey, we'll just apply concentrated efforts to a tiny, tiny part of the country. Then, anything bad that happens anywhere in that whole big country outside Baghdad will be ignored as irrelevant to judging the surge. At the same time, we can pump up any good news as surge-a-riffic nonetheless!"

Did bad stuff happen in the whole big country outside Baghdad? Sure enough. A stunning bombing with a death toll of over 500, but that happened up in Kurdistan, so it wasn't counted on the "surge" ledger. Check.

I wish Colorado Pols was right about this, sort of. I wish Ken Salazar had enough honest Republicans willing to vote against their president and his war, come what may, to make a change and end this travesty.

And if wishes were ponies, I'd have a full herd of happy Iraqi ponies pulling a giant George Bush statue into place over the square where Saddam ruled for so many years.