LOST

Harpers:

The Washington Post went into red-alert ass-covering mode yesterday when its “Outlook” section published “expert” commentary on Senator Harry Reid’s recent remark that the war in Iraq is “lost.” This was clearly an attempt to salvage some dignity for columnist David Broder, who recently rebuffed Reid for making that charge...

The view that the Iraq war is lost is now mainstream opinion, even inside the beltway, and from what I understand the Post had to go trolling far and wide to find people to state the contrary. In the end it managed to dredge up the likes of Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, an architect of the “surge” strategy, Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, a conservative military historian. This is the equivalent of seeking opinion on the World Series from one side’s coaching staff and pawning it off as independent analysis.

As to Broder, he’s so predictable that he’s well beyond caricature. But some younger readers may imagine that there was a Golden Age of David Broder, when he offered penetrating analysis about national politics.

There was not. I went back a quarter-century, to Broder’s columns from 1982, and he was just as hilariously ill-informed then as he is today...

Read the rest, it is quite entertaining.

Of course, equally hilarious (and infuriating) is the fact that after some feedback on his Reid bashing story, Broder himself admits that Bush's War is probably lost:

BRODER: Well, there are a whole variety of them. The Democrats have -- are being pushed by the anti-war wing of their party, which gets stronger, probably, every day. The president is -- still has the backing of most Republicans, who say that they support his effort to try to salvage something that would look like a victory in Iraq -- whether that's achievable is really doubtful.