Excuses 2.0

K-Drum wonders (well, not really, he knows the answer) what Bill Kristol will do now that Bush has started taking his advice: "So if it doesn't work, Bill, what are you going to do? Will you admit that the strategy you endorsed was wrong? Or will you just regroup and blithely insist that it was never implemented the way you wanted?" The latter, obviously. The striking thing is that Kristol is already laying the groundwork for this:

The key is the urgency, the speed and the full bore commitment that the U.S. government, across the board, puts on implementing this. Don't slow-walk the troops in. Front-load the surge. Get Petraeus over there. He's the commander who has to execute it. It's crazy to have Casey execute the first month of the plan and then have a transition then.

Kristol also reveals during the same exchange that he doesn't know the difference between blackjack (where you can double-down) and poker (where you can't) and offers fresh material for the right's inevitable stab in the back narrative. The economy with which all this is achieved is truly impressive; you need to read it for yourself. Victor Davis Hanson would expend 37,000 words making these points.

UPDATE: Even dumber excuses from New York Post columnist and fabricator Amir Taheri. This last, incidentally, is why it doesn't make sense to wonder why hawks don't suffer from being wrong. Rightwing pundits don't suffer under any circumstances -- you can make things up, get busted on drug charges, whatever, and it all works out fine.