A Little Perspective

As always, Digby reminds us there's more to the world than just O-Biden. What really should be an earth-shattering news story is that after seven years, Bush has agreed to a timetable to pull out in 2011. The Village is still in Biden shock, apparently. Froomkin at least noticed.

...But in the end, he bowed to the will of the Iraqis' elected representatives. After five and a half years of occupation, it was their turn to put a gun to Bush's head: The timetable was the price they demanded for agreeing to let American troops remain in the country beyond the expiration of a United Nations mandate in December.

Bush's acquiescence pulls the rug out from under Republican presidential candidate John McCain, whose position on Iraq was largely identical to Bush's -- pre-backflip. In some ways, the new timetable is even shorter than the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

So how is this not exactly what Bush had previously decried as an invitation to disaster?

What will people do when they actually notice Bush is now agreeing to a timetable for withdrawal? As I said back on Thursday, why is Dubya emboldening the terrorists? Is anyone going to bother to call out Bush on this...and more importantly call out McCain? The reason why not, according to Digby, is simple:

I don't know. This could be an extremely important political moment but I can't see how it's going to play. Will it be that the Republicans have finally acquiesced to reality and are accepting the terms that Obama has been pushing for some time, as Froomkin suggests? Or will it suggest that the brilliant military leader John McCain was right about the surge which led to our glorious victory?

The coverage has been so muddled that I can't tell yet what the political take-away will be for this. Maybe nothing at all. One thing's for sure: it's a testimony to their puerile obsession with shiny objects that the TV gasbags spent an entire two days bloviating about something quite dull that was going to be announced shortly and didn't pay any attention at all to something important that already had been.

You can bet McSame will want to say "We won, so now we're going home, the Iraq War is no longer a political hot potato." The thing is, it's hard for Obama to say otherwise.

One more reason perhaps for General Petraeus to consider throwing his lot in with Volcano John, perhaps.