The war vs. the election?

[babylonsister]

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16235.html

The war vs. the election?
Posted July 17th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

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For months, the McCain campaign has been itching to go after Obama’s patriotism. Apparently, they just figured out how they’d like to proceed.

It’s hard to know whether Scheunemann is, or is merely pretending to be, dimwitted, but this isn’t an especially complicated policy dispute. John McCain wants to stay the course; Barack Obama wants to change course. McCain believes keeping U.S. troops in Iraq indefinitely is the answer to our problem; Obama believes keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is the problem. McCain, as president, would set a policy of staying in Iraq until we achieve some elusive, hard-to-define “victory,” which McCain can’t quite explain, but he’ll know it when he sees it. Obama, as president, would set a different policy — careful, deliberate withdrawal, with flexibility based on facts on the ground and the advice of our military commanders.

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My friend Alex Koppelman took Scheunemann’s attack apart quite effectively.

There are a couple of interesting — and faulty — things about this line of attack. First, Obama may not have visited Afghanistan, but he somehow managed to come up with a policy for American strategy in that country that McCain is now emulating.

Also, though it makes for a neat sound bite, and perhaps an effective one, it’s hardly clear that visiting Iraq as a presidential candidate will actually give Obama a realistic picture of the situation there. As CNN’s Michael Ware, a longtime Iraq reporter, quipped earlier this year, when McCain and his surrogates were pressuring Obama to travel to Iraq, “I mean Senator McCain has been here, what, more than half a dozen times. And we’ve seen him get assessments of Iraq terribly wrong.”

Really, one need look no further than McCain’s own visits to Iraq to see just how skewed a picture such a trip can present, especially if someone wants to create a modern-day Potemkin village. Remember his visit to a seemingly peaceful market in Baghdad? That was only possible because of “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead,” and the next day, merchants there exposed the fiction behind his stroll.

I don’t know what’s gotten into Republicans lately. Is there something in the water?

Update: The Obama campaign has responded to the McCain campaign’s hatchet job with an effective memo/statement: “All John McCain has ever looked for in Iraq are reasons to stay there indefinitely. He has stubbornly championed a strategy of fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq regardless of the shifting facts offered to justify it, regardless of the levels of violence and political progress in the country, and regardless of the gathering strength of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. And now, as he advocates a policy of staying in Iraq indefinitely, it is clear that he is going to continue to adhere to George Bush’s ideological agenda even as every other critical national security challenge is neglected, and our troops continue to fight tour after tour of duty and our taxpayers spend $10 billion a month in Iraq.”