Douthat again....

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Monday September 28, 2009 · 5:45 AM PDT

2009/09/28 · 05:45

From www.nytimes.com

However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected "good war."...

In the words of Stephen Biddle, who advised McChrystal on the review, increasing our military involvement in Afghanistan is "a close call on the merits," whose "outcome is uncertain" and which is "likely to increase losses and violence in the short term in exchange for a chance at stability in the longer term."...

But the president can only bring the country with him if he really believes in the war that he’s inherited. For now, that remains an open question.

And if Obama takes us deeper into a conflict for which he doesn’t really have the stomach, then the outcome will almost certainly be tragic — for him, for us, and for Afghanistan.

The day after the death of William Safire, the New York Time's in-house conservative commentator for so many years, his latest successor, Ross Douthat, shows that however much one disagreed with him, Safire at least had the intellectual chops to make a coherent argument. With Douthat, not so much. Coherent thought is as foreign to him as kreplach is to a Muslim.

And if you have an extra minute or two as well as the patience to read the rest of his brain dribble for today, you will see that his touchstone for his exegesis is none other than that great bi-partisan man of peace, Joe Lieberman (Dem Rep Ind?, CT). One wonders why with a plethora of Republican hawks just itching for another Iraq (as well as wet dreaming about Gen. Stanley McChrystal some day bitch-slapping Ahmedinajad in Tehran), he would choose the premier Bush/McCain lickspittle to make his case. Probably just to show how even-handed he is in his thinking (?).

Do the editors at the NYT even bother to read this crap or do they just gag and hit the publish button? The funny part is that Douthat makes an incredibly strong argument for Obama's not sending more troops. I think what happens is that while downing a jumbo grape Slurpy, he had brain freeze and by the time he came out of it he forgot what his point was. Although, like the good little snide dick that he is, he does manage to inject at least one racial slur. In referencing Obama's reasoned call for a time-out, Douthat writes:

But that was before Afghanistan’s fraud-riddled elections, before Obama’s new top commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, came back with a dire report and a request for further reinforcements and before a spooked White House entered full-scale reassessment mode.

Spooked...Get it?...Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

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