Dude writes –

…

The right wing had no interest in highlighting Obama’s nuanced position in Austin, either, because there was (and is) a conservative interest in painting Obama as a heedless and irresponsible pacifist, with absolutely no experience of crashing an expensive aircraft on the territory of a country on which the United States had never declared war. In fact, the worst you can say of Obama’s position on Iraq (where we also didn’t declare war but where we did have a long series of U.N. resolutions putting the Saddam Hussein regime outside international law) is that he was a member of that quite large and undistinguished group that constituted the president’s fair-weather wartime friends. Shortly after Baghdad had fallen at a then-cost of perhaps 100 U.S. fatalities, he said publicly that there was no serious difference between the Bush position and his own. It was only by retro-engineering his politics, and pointing to a speech he had made in Chicago very much earlier in the Iraq debate, that he was able to create the idea that he had been both braver and more prescient than his rivals for the nomination.

According to your taste, then, this succession of local and national and now international shifts and adaptations makes Obama either a very ordinary politician or a highly extraordinary one. The timing of events in Iraq and Afghanistan seems to make him an astonishingly fortunate nominee. And fortunate, too, it must be said, in his opponent. Sen. John McCain could have said gravely that only the surge made the talk of American withdrawal –  whether it came from Nouri al-Maliki or Obama — possible in the first place. He could have taken Obama’s words from last February, about the 1st Cavalry vanquishing al-Qaida, and used them wryly and dryly to congratulate the younger man on being willing to learn. Instead, he peppered everything but the target with the inaccurate charge that Obama had always been anti-war and anti-surge. Obama may indeed have been serially for them after he was against them, but that’s different from (and better than) the other way around.

The cliché for the Obama phenomenon is jujitsu, where the strength of your opponent is precisely what you use against him. McCain had one particular strength when this campaign began: his fortitude in respect of Iraq, which entailed (as some people forget) his willingness to criticize the commander in chief in time of war. Now he is in real danger of confusing the two things and trying to make criticism or disagreement appear to be suspect in themselves. If last week hasn’t taught him that this is a doomed tactic — and strategy — then he is unteachable.

All here.

Also: Victor Davis Hanson and Christopher Hitchens take on the WWII revisionists, centering on Patrick J. Buchanan who is a complete fucknut. Video here.

Chapter two now available here.

Chapter three now available here.

Chapter four now available here.

Chapter five now available here.

Tipping top hat to Doddyman

Jimbo and the Gaurdain exchange emails about ‘Islamofascism’ here.

A piece by the Drink Soaked Trotskyite himself from October last year on the same here.

Thick Guardianista cunts.