Someone's Head Is Somewhere

I think we need better pundits than Michael O'Hanlon:

"How could Democrats possibly hand McCain a better issue than to let him run on his record of advocating a robust U.S. presence in Iraq with all the positive battlefield news that is filtering out of that country?" asked Michael O'Hanlon, a national security adviser at the Brookings Institution who has been at the center of the Iraq debate since the war's outset."

Not having any real credentials myself, I don't like to question the credentials of others, but it's worth noting that O'Hanlon is a defense budget analyst and not some kind of Iraq expert or brilliant strategist in either the military or political sense. He is, in short, just a pundit like me but he's a pundit who plays an expert on TV. If you think we could use a better class of foreign policy pundits, you might want to consider buying Heads in the Sand and making me a famous best-selling author just like Jonah Goldberg. Speaking of which, official blurbs are now up at the HITS Amazon page and one of them's kinda funny.

On a more substantive note, look -- there are a lot of things making George W. Bush unpopular right now. But the disaster of Iraq is at the very heart of what it is that's brought the conservative movement into its current state of discredit. Democrats obviously want to keep that whole storyline front and center. The problem is that keeping it front and center is problematic for a certain number of people, O'Hanlon included, who were complicit in the selling and prolonging of the war. The interests of people like that just aren't well-aligned with the interests of progressive politics in the United States.