Sick of the Surge? Let's Spurge!

Well, it's almost surge day. I have excellent intentions of doing "live" surge speech blogging tomorrow. "Live" is in quotes because a) I won't be home when the speech is on, so I'll have to tape it, and b) as I watch the tape and type, I'll need to pause from time to time to, um, vocalize. I say "excellent intentions" because I don't know that I can listen closely to an entire Bush speech. He is so very not euphonious. And I may stroke out in the middle, removing the choice entirely from my hands.

But just in case this all happens, and the VCR functions, and my blood vessels stand up to the challenge of watching a monkey give a presidential address, let's assess where we stand, at Surge Day Minus One.

The surge, she is dead.

Everyone in the world is now on record (except the president, of course) with an opinion, and all of those opinions converge on one thing: the surge won't work. Every single respectable Dem is on record saying it's a stupid idea. Biden gave a particularly ripe version, alleging that the Bushies don't care that it won't work, they're just stalling so that withdrawal will be the next guy's problem. McCain, the AEI crowd, the Weekly Standard crowd -- they all say they're behind the idea, but they're not, really. They want more than 20,000, and they're not going to get it because there isn't more than 20,000 to send; and they want a long deployment, and they aren't going to get it because the 20,000 is already made up of extended tours. So they're behind a surge, but they're directly opposed to the version of a surge that we're going to get.

So that covers that. For me, I'm with the Dems that the surge is stupid. I'm directly opposed to the neocon crowd in that I think their only slightly higher numbers are equally ridiculous to 20,000 (I enjoy Andrew Sullivan, but he needs to unconvince himself of the fact that 50,000 is the magic number. It ain't). But really I'm with Biden. The interesting thing is not the surge. The interesting thing will be after the surge, when we find out how we're really going to get out of this war.

Bush is Bush. He has never admitted a mistake, and he never will. And you're kidding yourself if you think he's going to make his first admission of a screw-up by admitting he lost a war. A war, for god's sake -- that would definitely be starting at the top. And you know it's not going to happen, ever. So the only question then is who is going to try to force his hand, and how far are they going to go to try to force it?

So, sure. I'll watch the surge speech (I originally typed that "spurge seech", which sounds accurate, somehow). I'll write you a little something about it. But it's only interesting as a starting point for the next political phase. In which Republicans castrate and cannibalize their own leader, I suspect.