Making It Up As They Go Along

It's gotten to the point for war defenders that they have to dig up year-old emails to make their points.

Reader SB points us to an entry today at The Corner, a blog belonging to National Review magazine, entitled "FROM IRAQ: A MARINE’S NOTES."

Among other things, the unnamed Marine tells the National Review that:

"[M]orale among our guys is very high. They not only believe that they are winning, but that they are winning decisively. They are stunned and dismayed by what they see in the American press, whom they almost universally view as against them.
That sentiment seems a bit out of place, given that the president himself admitted last week the United States isn't winning the war. Granted, his words were widely reported by the media -- but that's hardly a reason to hate on the messenger."

Turns out the post is out of place, as SB discovered: the "MARINE'S NOTES" are actually an excerpt from an e-mail that circulated widely around November 2005, perhaps earlier.

The e-mail is said to have been written by an unnamed Marine or just-retired Marine, who had recently (at the time of the e-mail's alleged writing) returned from Iraq.

So this latest justification for war is that somebody in Iraq supposedly wrote that it was going well a year ago.

But wait, there's more.

This radio host put up a picture of John Kerry eating alone in Iraq, with the assumption that he's being shunned by the troops after his comments in late October (the "botched joke"). The entry has the headline "A picture tells a thousand words". The only words missing are "this picture was taken in January 2006, nine months before Kerry ever told that joke."

This is the scraping at the bottom of the barrel for war defenders, desperate to tell the story they believe in their heart to be true, despite all available evidence. It's downright embarrassing.

UPDATE: Turns out that the year-old email spam was floating around the Iraq Study Group. This is what they were using as "evidence" for their report.

God help us all.