The Mother Of All Punts

Cross posted from Article of Faith:

So it's 4th and long and Iraq, and what does Junior decide to do? Throw a Hail Mary and go long? "Double down" as Tim Russert kept saying last night?

Uh, no. He's punting, folks...a long, bloody, two-year kick in the groin of the American public.

Here's John Kerry's take on Bush's surge and purge plan (emphasis mine):

"This plan is neither new nor forward looking. This is more of what's taken us backwards. There's no military solution in Iraq. There is only a political solution, and the President has no plan to achieve it. We're caught in a civil war in Iraq. Escalation is not the answer. The best answer is to set a deadline to bring our heroes home, force Iraqis to stand up for Iraq, and get Iraq'’s neighbors to start taking more responsibility for Iraq's security."

You know who also made the most sense last night, other than Dick Durbin's "The United States can't be the world's 911"? Lawrence O'Donnell on Scarborough Country who made the following observation (and I'm paraphrasing):

"It's not 21,500 additional troops being deployed, it's 5,000. You have to divide the total number by four because troops sleep once a day."

I'd never thought of it that way, but he's right. At the most, there would only be an additional 5,000 troops on the streets at any given time, clearing these neighborhoods, fighting insurgents, etc. WTF good is that going to do?

And all this claptrap saber rattling this morning by the Bushies about threatening Iran and Syria is just moving the goalposts, trying to create yet another imaginary reason and enemy to somehow justify this ongoing catastrophe, just long enough to pass it off to the next guy.

I think perhaps Joe Biden was right the other day when he argued that Bush's whole "surge" plan is merely designed to postpone the loss in Iraq and punt the mess to his successor in '08.

Said Biden, "I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration believes Iraq is lost. They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. The best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy -- literally, not figuratively. The next [president] will be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

That's all this is about. It's about preserving George Bush's legacy and keeping this mess going until he can leave office, say he did everything he could, and leave it to the next president (ala Gerald Ford) to deal with and end it.

And the Dems shouldn't let him. As I wrote yesterday, it's time to pull the plug on this calamity and to hold the president accountable for his war before he leaves office.

His "legacy" isn't worth another 3,000 dead Americans. It isn't worth one.

Cross posted to The Dem Daily