Get Ready for the Show

Billmon has another typically brilliant post up on the recent news items that Iraq "independently" is calling for a US troop withdrawal timetable and that our military is saying troops will start coming home soon. He gives the implications in better detail than I could. I would add only one thing--expect the local tv news in your area to have features almost every night on the troops getting back home, complete with tearful, loving families reuniting and declarations of the good that was done for freedom in Iraq. Repubs won't have to run an election commercial.

I've been yelling about this happening for a while now, and fortunately Feingold gave the Dems a possible hook for saying it was their idea all along and Bushnev just folded to pressure. They'll likely blow that, however, just as now they'll just continue in the "me, too" chorus on Iraq, as they have from the beginning. "Success" will be on our local screens every night (with few challenging the BS response we'll get to "how many will still be there and will stay there after the first Tuesday in November?"), and it will give enough Repub incumbents, including Lieberman by August, enough cover to pull through the election. (How does a conservative like Webb win in VA, for example, if Iraq and superior military experience to Allen's are off the table and he's just as bad on most other issues for Dems who might otherwise turn out?) As Billmon says, some of us have been here before with Nixon and the 1972 elections, but the older you get, the more you see that "the only lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history."

The first Wednesday after the first Tuesday in November could be a real hoot here on the blogs. For Repubs.