There are days when I walk around with an idea for a post all day. The idea usually comes to me while I’m having coffee or feeding the cats in the morning and I turn it over and over in my mind for a few hours. Generally by the time I get to work, I’ve got a pretty good idea about what I’m going to say. Sometimes I’ll call Jane or Pach and bounce some ideas off of them and get to writing once I’ve handled the day’s paperwork and (mostly) cleared off my desk for the night.

However, some days I think I’ve got the post to end all posts lined up in my head and I will discover to my shock and chagrin that Digby or Glenn Greenwald has already written about it, and I’m totally hosed. Approaching a topic after one of those two has already handled it is kind of like approaching the all-you-can-eat food bar at Ryan’s Steakhouse after Rush Limbaugh has come through. There’s, like, nothing left.

It reminds me of something I said months ago (with apologies to Dorothy Parker):

I had finished this post and put it in for publication when I went over to Digby’s and read what I meant to say said better. We need a verb for that. “D’oh! I got Digby’d!” which means, “I felt I had something terribly important to impart, but then Digby said it so much more eloquently that I am forced hang my head in shame and go back to eating pudding cups on the couch.”

Oh, sagacious Digby. You are the most emphatic Still Small Voice I’ve ever heard.

When compelled I am
To try an epigram,
I never take the credit.
I simply say that Digby said it.

Well, today, it was Glennzilla.

See, several nights ago, I got another hectoring email from the Melanie Morgan crowd, crowing their delight about the recent decline in violence in Iraq. They seemed to think that I was going to be somehow downcast that incrementally fewer people on both sides are being killed and maimed in our nation’s most spectacular foreign policy cock-up ever. That, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. If the fucking “Surge” is working, then by God, Surge On!

And let’s declare victory and get the fuck out of there, okay? OKAY?!

Of course, it isn’t that simple, and now Rightard boot-licker Howie Kurtz is presenting yet another, “This doesn’t look good for the Democrats…!” wheeze, in the mold of so many that have come before, another, “The Democrats are moving/have moved/will move too far to the left, and that’s going to be a Big Problem for them.”

(Why do I always hear that pronouncement in the voice of Mara Liasson?)

Well, I had all these great things to say about that, but G2 got there first.

Whenever one thinks that our discourse regarding the Iraq War just can’t get any more inane, it always manages to find a way. If the violence in Iraq continues to decrease — and even if one accepts the most dubious of premises in order to see it all in the best possible light (the decrease will endure, it’s because of the Magical Surge, the de facto ethnic cleansing can reverse itself, etc.) — that rather obviously doesn’t mean that the war has achieved anything positive, either in that country or for our own. It just means that we have begun to contain some of the monstrous harm which our invasion unleashed there.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Greenwald, for putting that so elegantly and succinctly that it leaves me with pretty much nothing else to add. But, please, do go on.

Acting as though a decrease in violence is now a positive reflection on the invasion itself is irrational in the extreme. It’s basically akin to someone sitting on their couch and chewing up food and spitting it all over the floor and the walls and the furniture month after month until it piles up and congeals and grows into mold, turning the room into a repulsive, health-threatening mess. Guests come by and run away in horror at how repugnant it all is.

Then, one day, the person decides to pick up some of the congealed food from the floor and scrapes a little bit off the walls, making it a bit less filthy. Then he starts calling his friends, announcing: “You must come over. I’ve completely redecorated my home and it looks beautiful now. You have to see what I’ve done to it.”

Um, ew. But yes, how true.

That what David Broder’s prescient prediction was all about when, last January, he announced that “at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback.”

Ah, yes, the much-vaunted comeback of Gee Dubya. What are those most recent poll numbers again? Oh, right! Lower than Nixon at his worst. Oh, and support for the war? Lower than ever.

CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Opposition to the Iraq war is at an all-time high despite reports of a reduction of violence in the country, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Thursday.

Sixty-eight percent of poll respondents opposed the war, setting a record. The level of opposition is slightly up from last month and 1 percentage point higher than the previous record of 67 percent, first set in December 2006 in a CNN/Opinion Research survey.

Support for the war in Iraq among Americans has dropped to 31 percent from 34 percent last month, the new poll found.

But the Beltway Bitchez will continue to paint the situation as dire and desperate for the Democrats, and the only people who will believe it? The goddamn Democrats.

But, hey, thank god we have the stellar wisdom of Serious Beltway Insiders like Howard Kurtz, who will always be there to explain to us how every burp, hiccup, and fart that happens in Iraq is good for the Republicans and bad for Democrats, that opposing the war is bad for America, and that Michelle Malkin is a good person.

Down is up. Black is white. Ignorance is strength. And we have always been at war with EastAsia. Yee haw. Thank god the DC establishment never listens to us Dirty Fucking Hippies. Otherwise there might be some kind of impediment to the Right running our country into the ditch and destroying our standing in the world forever and ever.

And Lord knows, we can’t have that.

Related posts:

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  2. Late Night: Birther Disease Becomes Metastasized Stupid
  3. Late Late Nite FDL: Real Kind Of Thing
  4. Remember Iraq or Ray Odierno is Still Wrong
  5. Torture: Obama Heeded Maliki on Abuse Photos, Says McClatchy; What That Says for Our Occupation