Great. First Day Back From Vacation and I Get Stuck on a Class Project with that Goddam Band Nerd Who Won't Leave His Retainer Alone.

David Brooks, "Making the Surge Work," courtesy the Sunday New York Times which, it needs to be added, has now been publishing his crap for two years beyond the point where he had anything to say, not that what he did have to say way back when was anything important.

Let the record show that when the time came to stand up for the US of A, the Bobo Brookses of the world instead chose to cover their asses to the bitter end.

I know, I know, it's not a surprise to you. But we are now well past the time when people who have been hoodwinked about it need to begin to understand that here--and it was exactly the same thing with Vietnam--that lying about military situations does nothing but cost lives. American lives, if those are the only ones that matter to you.

Oh, not Brooks' lies, which increasingly serve only to demonstrate the folly, on top of the dishonesty and the lunacy, of the Times' insistence on giving "The Right" a voice on its Op-Ed pages, not to mention planting a big wet smooch on all those Red state values voters. They breathe virtue but soon run out of breath, to steal one from Anatole France.

I thought you'd enjoy a bit:

Over (the last three years) a chorus has arisen to oppose (turning over policing responsibilities to the Iraqis). The members of this chorus--John McCain, The Weekly Standard, whispering dissenters in the middling rankings of the military--argue that it's simply unrealistic to expect human beings in these circumstances to become impartial nation-builders. These dissenters have argued, since the summer of 2003, that the U.S. must commit more troops to establish security before anything else becomes possible.

Dissenters. Dissenters! That's like saying someone on the Reynolds American board who argues for aiming more cigarette advertising at children is a Corporate Rebel. Two major warfloggers. The Standard, as befits Bill Kristol's estimation of his personal military expertise, has been nit-picking the war since it started turning to shit. BFD. If they'd said something ahead of time it might have meant something.

McCain, now, I'd like to see where he seriously criticized the war effort before the 2004 elections were over, let alone, oh, you know, used his position as one of the two most influential US Senators on military affairs to actually do something about it.

McCain has no excuses; he well knows we do not have the troops to make a difference in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. He knows we went to war four years ago without sufficient numbers, and he knows we did so for purely political reasons, just as we now plan a CYA "surge" (things are so bad that we can't even brand the thing as a needed correction, because The Best We Can Do is a temporary patch with a three-six month shelflife.)

McCain knows all this. Does Bobo? Does he care? If you move precisely five columns to the right from his breathtaking list of Dissenters you find that Frank Rich has actually read the new Army Field Manual on Counterinsurgency, or enough of it to have calculated a minimal requirement of 100,000 additional troops for Baghdad. Brooks, on the other hand, seems to have read nothing beyond the Standard and some Bush hagiographies, like some weepy dateless sophomore on Prom Night poring over the signatures on her 8th-grade yearbook:

For over three years , President Bush sided with the light-footprint school. He did so for personal reasons, not military ones. Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment.

So the straightforward answer is that Brooks, having gone eighteen months between his "I may need to rethink the overwhelming success of the Iraq war" moment and the 2006 elections, has now decided that Iraq had nothing to do with the Global War on Terror, that its every rationale, all of which he trumpeted to some extent or another and the major one of which his paper famously created, are like last week's Christmas wrappings, and that Bush is to be forgiven for not taking any of that seriously because the main requirement of a President of the United States is to serve as a shining example for future Cub Scouts.