Self-Imposed 72-Hour Blogging Moratorium

...is over. Just needed to recharge the batteries. I actually stayed off the Internet for almost two days for the first time in ages. But I'm back for the duration of the 80-day push to the midterm elections.

Just heard Bush losing his shit in that press conference today. I don't know how much he'll get out of the construction "If you think Iraq is bad now, just wait and see what would happen if we pull out!" He actually said that. The logic goes something like, "You'd better keep letting me fuck up or I'm going to fuck up even more!"

The decision to keep troops or redeploy troops in Iraq cannot be divorced from the commander in chief and civilian leadership that are the architects of the policy. The choice is not "do you want to stay or leave," it's "do you want these guys to keep running this country into the ground or not?" It's also impossible to talk about Iraq as if it's a choice between a series of good policy options. There aren't any. And the recognition that things won't get better on the ground is informing decisions by moderate Republicans like Chris Shays to announce their willingness to push for set withdrawal dates.

And the other false discussion is the one where anyone discusses whether to stay or leave at all, really. "We're not leaving so long as I'm the President," Bush said today. He believes that leaving equals losing. It's at the core of neocon ideology. If you just sit in a war zone, no matter whether it devolves into civil war or becomes a civil society, by their definition you can't lose. Of course, the "future President" that has to clean up the mess, he or she will be the one blamed for losing the war. It's the stabbed in the back theory that we've seen since Vietnam. The question is whether the American public will swallow what will be peddled to them again.