Friday, August 22, 2008

Timetable is on the table, cont.

The other day I posted about the Bush administration's inking a draft agreement for a withdrawal timetable in Iraq, one that would get the troops completely out by the end of 2011, and one which looks eerily like the one Obama discussed with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, which suggested withdrawal a year earlier.

Now, HuffPost blogger Marty Kaplan weighs in.
Now that Condi has negotiated the very timetable for withdrawal from Iraq that this administration has been calling treasonous for the past three years, will anyone hold them accountable for the pure political motivations for their turnaround? Or will America be as obscenely forgiving of this attempt to deprive Obama of an issue as they've been willing to take amnesia pills about the gang that preferred "[My] Pet Goat" to "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"?
Uh, no, and no. Is he kidding? But wait, there's more:
Depend on a revisionist account from the White House that makes this stunning reversal the inevitable consequence of all they've done before. But just because they're good at propaganda doesn't mean we have to be good at stupid.
Uh, yeah right. Marty is being a little optimistic about the collective memory of the American electorate. The Bushies, and the McBushies for that matter, live smack-dab in the middle of "Idiot America." If Obama can manage to get any traction out of the withdrawal timetable now, it would take massive amounts of ad buys in that region, and it would accomplish precious little. He needs to reach swing voters; do the swing voters share that laziness? Well, if a recent study is to be believed, swing voters already have their minds made up on a subconscious level, and their decision to vote one way or another may have little or nothing to do with the issues at hand. That may be, but I can't imagine a voter at this point who likes enough about both candidates to be undecided.

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