Hearing Senator Dick Lugar (R) on This Week today, in response to a question from George Stephanopoulis, say: "Well it's just the incompetence of this Administration," while Joe Biden nodded vigorously. The topic? The growing disaster in Iraq and the failure to allocate rebuilding funds. For more on this see Galbraith's article in this month's NY Review of Books (he points out all the nepotism in the Iraq CPA, and then quotes one official [I believe it was Ari Fleischer's brother, who only got the job because he was Ari Fleischer's brother] who says "there's too much cronyism in Iraqi society").
Also pleasing to this tortured newshound is this. I'm certainly not referring to the grim news out of Iraq--but to the editorials in the military trade papers, with which I concur.
Kerry got some help from Lugar's comments today, and also from Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (whose comments I heard on CSPAN a couple days ago):
"We've gotta be honest with ourselves ... the worst thing we can do is hold ourselves hostage to some grand illusion that we're winning. Right now we're not winning. Things are getting worse. Measure that by any measurement you want. More casualties, more deaths, more oil pipeline sabotage, I mean you pick the measurement standard -- and it's worse than where it was six months ago or 12 months ago."
Joe Biden on This Week today laid out what Kerry should say to focus his policy on Iraq, and it was very elegant and precise and would work, but unfortunately I can't find a transcript yet.
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