*cough* BULLSHIT *cough*

Let's lie again, like we did last Summer (and the Summer before and so on):

President Bush, facing a growing Republican revolt against his Iraq policy, has rejected calls to change course but will launch a campaign emphasizing his intent to draw down U.S. forces next year and move toward a more limited mission if security conditions improve, senior officials said yesterday.

Top administration officials have begun talking with key Senate Republicans to walk them through his view of the next phase in the war, beyond the troop increase he announced six months ago today. Bush plans to lay out what an aide called "his vision for the post-surge" starting in Cleveland today to assure the nation that he, too, wants to begin bringing troops home eventually.

This would be about the 50th time Bush has promised to draw down troops with a hypothetical IF!

It has been bullshit before, it's bullshit now, it will be bullshit as long as he is made to do so.

The audacity of this empty rhetoric will be matched only by the speed in which this bilge is swallowed by the media.

Michael Gordon already has six months worth of columns written and submitted.

And who comes along in this article to enable this continuing line of bullshit... but the clown prince of this idiocy, FRED KAGAN!

When informed that the Iraqi's have failed to meet one political or economic benchmark, Freddy is as undisturbed as your typical cult leader:

One of the intellectual authors of Bush's troop increase dismissed the importance of such goals. "I always thought those were unreasonable benchmarks," Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute, said at a forum yesterday. "I always thought it was a mistake for the administration to go down that road."

That must be why you've managed not to emphasize this point over the last seven months jackass.