This is mendacious even by FOX News standards.

Reporter Courtney Keely reports from Baghdad to tell us that the surge is working. "It is exciting to be walking through a marketplace in Baghdad, something I've never been able to do!" she says, with all the vacuity of a tourist. Never mind the phalanx of American troops guarding her, the Blackhawk helicopters providing cover overhead, or the fact that the Iraqis she speaks to tell her that the market itself has too few people as is a total failure. What matters is that she's able to walk through Baghdad wearing a flak jacket and helmet! Just like a stroll at any American farmer's market! And it's exciting!

(Via Crooks and Liars).

An open thread over at Kos points us to this documentary from the Guardian UK. It's difficult to believe that anyone could watch this and not come to the conclusion that our continuing occupation of Iraq can only bring less stability and greater resentment among Iraqis -- that, indeed, there is no military solution in Iraq.

But if there is one thing the last seven years have taught us, it's that there remains a significant percentage of people who will adhere to the rhetoric that comes out of their own mouths no matter the reality they observe with their own eyes.

An outsized proportion of such people, not incidentally, occupy seats in Congress.

Gen. John Batiste “has been asked to leave his position as a consultant to CBS News” over a new VoteVets ad criticizing the Iraq war, Think Progress reports. His interview with Keith Olbermann is worth watching:

(Via Atrios.)

Stoller makes a very cogent point about America's historic role -- and Bush's declining role -- in world affairs:

Much of what America did in international affairs prior to the Bush Presidency was to act as sort of buoy, or a neutral third party in negotiations, a bulwark that other nations could broadly trust. America didn't always keep its word, and it wasn't always a perfectly done role, but there really was no alternative. And I think what the Iraq war has shown is that the alternative really is total chaos, and that means that America can reclaim a leading role in global affairs if we begin to rebuild our credibility. Because of Iran's recent bad behavior, nations around the world want to see us reclaim that role, though with more checks on our range of action.

Bush, aside from the ability to start new wars, is largely irrelevant to that goal. Most Presidents find their influence waning in the final two years, but with Bush, it seems like that decline will be larger than usual. Bush lies almost constantly, except when he doesn't know what he's talking about and says something nonsensical. Domestically and internationally, that means it's useful to try to ignore him as much as possible and do business with the people that will be in charge when he's gone. Pelosi, in going to Syria, and in telling Bush to calm down, is looking much more like a President than Bush is. Bush is even having his role as commander-in-chief challenged, by both his own ineptitude and the public's willingness to strip him of power. By default, that power is slowly bleeding over to Pelosi, Reid, and whichever member of Congress is leading that day and filling the massive void Bush has left. This is not an ideal scenario, but it's the one that Bush set himself up for when he refused to acknowledge the results of the 2006 elections and what that meant for his method of governance.

He may hold the constitutional office, but he is less and less the President every day.

I was in DC last week, and let me reiterate, for the record -- one more time! -- how much I loathe that town.

To be fair, its restaurants are fine and its nightlife entertaining, in a bemused art-student-at-a-frat-party sort of way; and certainly the cherry blossoms blooming in January added a charming lift to people's gait as they strolled down the street.

But our nation's capital is, to put it mildy, insular, if not downright self-obsessed. We live in a time when the world is on fire, and the only heat felt by the DC elite is the burning envy that someone else gets to hold the fiddle for a while.

But if we didn't have the madness of the chattering classes, would we have to invent it? Perhaps. If we could. I think it would take a good deal of psychotropics and days upon days of staring at Rorschach inkblots to even begin to make the connections that many of our best and brightest pundits make in explaining the world to us.

Digby has been tracking their latest erudite observations, and their brilliant ability to make connections between dots that most of us don't even see:

One of the sillier theories I'd been bouncing around was that the punditocrisy and the reporters had spent so much time riffing and boozing during that interminable period of mourning for Ford that they somehow conflated their tributes to his moderation and bipartisanship with some sort of mandate from the American people in this last election.

Up to that point, the media had seen the Democrats' post-election promises to "work with the other side" --- as a rhetorical rebuke to the way the Republicans had governed. They were right. While I'm sure the Democrats had no intentions of running the congress like a plantation as the Republicans had, nobody thought it meant that they would follow the president's agenda or compromise on issues on which they had run, like the war or preserving social security. The election, after all, was a referendum on a party that had had six years of total power and who's approval ratings were hovering in the low teens. The press had had to extract assurances that the Democrats wouldn't impeach the president, for crying out loud. Bipartisan kumbaaya was clearly not on the agenda.

Suddenly, Jerry Ford died and it seemed to me that days and days of eulogizing Ford's legacy just prior to the new congress taking over (and during the holiday drinking season) had caused the media to literally confuse the Ford ascension in 1974 with the election last November.

As Woody Guthrie said, any fool can make something complicated; it takes a genius to make it simple. Expect to see a great deal of foolishness in the coming days as the talking heads explain to you how George Bush's escalation of the war in Iraq is precisely what the American people voted for when they voted Democratic last November. We were, after all, already pining for the Ford Era. We just didn't know it yet.

The Washington Post has a good article today on the degree to which George Bush's petulant escalation of the war ("Screw Jim Baker!") goes against near uniformity among the military leadership:

When President Bush goes before the American people tonight to outline his new strategy for Iraq, he will be doing something he has avoided since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003: ordering his top military brass to take action they initially resisted and advised against.

Bush talks frequently of his disdain for micromanaging the war effort and for second-guessing his commanders....

But over the past two months, as the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated and U.S. public support for the war has dropped, Bush has pushed back against his top military advisers and the commanders in Iraq: He has fashioned a plan to add up to 20,000 troops to the 132,000 U.S. service members already on the ground. As Bush plans it, the military will soon be "surging" in Iraq two months after an election that many Democrats interpreted as a mandate to begin withdrawing troops.

Pentagon insiders say members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have long opposed the increase in troops and are only grudgingly going along with the plan because they have been promised that the military escalation will be matched by renewed political and economic efforts in Iraq.

Apparently the Joint Chiefs are the last constituency in America to believe the President's word on anything. But then, they're under duress, aren't they?

WSJ:

Although White House officials stress that no final decisions have been made, several aides involved in the internal deliberations say President Bush and senior administration officials appear receptive to calls to temporarily send 15,000 to 30,000 new U.S. forces to Iraq to bolster the 140,000 troops there.

In recent meetings with Mr. Bush, senior Pentagon officials said increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq for a few months may improve conditions on the ground there but cautioned that timing would be critical, since limits on available troop equipment mean additional forces couldn't be sustained for a long period of time, according to people familiar with the discussions....

Although some senior military commanders in the Pentagon support sending more forces to Iraq, some officers in Iraq question how much impact the additional troops would have. The skeptics argue that the military, strained by the lengthy deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, could sustain the new forces in Iraq only for approximately six months. Critics of the proposal express concerns about where the additional forces would come from. Cobbling together 20,000 to 30,000 additional soldiers may require the Army to extend the deployments of units in Iraq.

It's one thing for Bush to have gambled his presidency on Iraq, but it's another thing altogether for McCain to gamble the prospects of his on it, as well.

As Juan Cole puts it: "Hope springs eternal in the human breast, which is the only explanation for adopting this stupid idea."

That, and a political instinct governed more by juvenile defiance than mature realpolitik.

Chuck Todd reads between the lines to limn the meaning in Mike Murphy's op-ed calling for Bush to expand his war cabinet to include Dems:

But what makes this op-ed facinating is not what Murphy writes but what he doesn't write. Murphy is a one-time political aide to both John McCain and Mitt Romney, two of the three frontrunners for the WH '08 GOP nod. And his op-ed seems to scream, "PRES. BUSH, STOP IRAQ FROM BEING A 'REPUBLICAN WAR'!" The op-ed doesn't specifically say this, but the message is implied. There are many GOP strategists who worry that if Iraq is still the major issue in '08 and Iraq is still viewed as Bush's war (translation: the GOP's war), it won't matter who either party nominates for president, the GOP will be in an unwinnable situation. The fact is, no matter how unpopular Bush is right now, the GOP desperately needs him to pivot on Iraq and find a way out or the entire party will pay one more time in '08.

Sorta reminds you of the allegation that the facts have been fixed around the policy, eh?:

WASHINGTON - U.S. military and intelligence officials have systematically underreported the violence in
Iraq in order to suit the Bush administration's policy goals, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group said.

In its report on ways to improve the U.S. approach to stabilizing Iraq, the group recommended Wednesday that the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense make changes in the collection of data about violence to provide a more accurate picture.

The panel pointed to one day last July when U.S. officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. "Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence," it said.