Frank Rich is ratcheting up his truthful dispatches

[Doctor_J]

http://wealthyfrenchman.blogspot.com/

'To further prop up the war, Mr. Bush had to find some way to forestall verdicts on the "surge," which commanders had predicted could be judged by late summer. He also had to neutralize last week's downbeat Congress-mandated report card on the Iraqi government's progress toward its 18 benchmarks.

The latter task was easy. The report card grades on a steep curve (and even then must settle for a C-minus average and a couple of incompletes). Deflecting gloom about the "surge" is trickier. It's hard to argue that we're on our way to securing Baghdad, the stated goal, when attacks on our own safe haven, the Green Zone, are rising rapidly, more than doubling from March to May, according to the United Nations.

But you can never underestimate this White House's ingenuity. It turns out that the "surge," which most Americans thought began shortly after the president announced it in January, is brand-new! We're just "at the starting line," Tony Snow told the network morning news shows last week, as he pounded in the message that "we have a new course in Iraq, and it's two weeks old."

Mr. Snow's television hosts were not so rude as to point out that the Pentagon had previously designated Feb. 14 as the starting line of the surge's first operation, and had also said that its March report on Iraq should be used as the "baseline from which to measure future progress." That was then, and this is now. The Baghdad clock has been reset. July is the new February. As we slouch toward the sixth anniversary of 9/11, the war against Al Qaeda has only just begun.'

[jimshoes]

1. Any more it's like

lies are just expected from the White House. It's not even a "gasp" moment nowadays.

[Vickers]

2. "television hosts were not so rude as to point out..."

It's time to get rude, folks.

[Supersedeas]

3. not the TV hosts are rude -- they are just plain incompetent

[Doctor_J]

4. Incompetent? No

Complicit? You bet. Come the War Crimes Tribunals, Matthews and Blitzer and the rest of this White House's enablers will be sitting in the defendants' box next to Wolfowitz and Cheney.