Bedtime for Fred

He could have aced the part, but the rehearsals were murder, so Fred Thompson's agent can start fielding offers again. The Law & Order star announced today that he has stopped auditioning for the White House.

It was fun while it lasted. Before he declared his candidacy, Thompson was running second in the national polls, but the rigors of actually campaigning were too much.

He ran for President from a Barcalounger, as Dick Cavett observed in his New York Times blog, and gave new meaning to "laid back" until he bestirred himself in the South Carolina debate to deliver a few barbs for Mike Huckabee, who will no doubt benefit from his absence in the Florida primary.

Since everybody else is playing Ronald Reagan in this campaign, Thompson's road-show performance won't be missed.

A Sane Re-Start for the Iraq Debate

After all the wishful thinking and political posturing on all sides, a basis for serious discussion makes the “tenuous case” for staying in Iraq while scaling down our presence.

The report urging “strategic patience” is by Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank chaired by former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, with a bipartisan board including Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and William S. Cohen, a former Republican Senator who was Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton.

Some recent advances in Iraq, Cordesman writes, are the result of “sheer luck,” such as Sunni tribesmen turning against Al Qaeda insurgents. He quotes an unnamed U.S. official as describing our situation as "three dimensional chess in the dark while someone is shooting at you."

Rejecting the extremes of staying the course or immediate withdrawal, Cordesman makes a case for phasing down troop levels starting early next year.

His analysis and recommendations will draw fire for being too qualified, too middle-of-the-road and politically unsatisfying. But they have the ring of reality, something so rare in the furor over Iraq that has made Americans unhappy with both the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress elected to oppose him.

Here, at least, is a starting point for facing the true options and thinking seriously about them.

As Cordesman writes, “The U.S. will ultimately be judged far more by how it leaves Iraq, and what it leaves behind, than how it entered Iraq.”

We’ve lost the war. Can we win the withdrawal?

Out-of-Iraq Shell Games

After years of blundering, the proprietors and enablers of this misbegotten war seem determined to end it the way they began it and waged it--with lies, evasions and cowardice.

The opinion polls show growing public impatience, but the politicians keep playing the same old games.

President Bush is being bubbled around the country to puff out his chest for groups of businessmen and proclaim, "Troop levels will be decided by our commanders on the ground, not by political figures in Washington, D.C."

Faithful Sen. Chuck Grassley, who does not have to face voters next year, tells wavering Republican colleagues who do that they should wait to hear from Gen, Petraeus since they confirmed him by such an overwhelming margin.

But in Baghdad, Petraeus is telling reporters, "We're still at the harder-before-it-gets-easier point” and reiterating, as he has be doing from the start of the Surge, that any solution in Iraq has to be political, not military.

So, as we watch their hands carefully, we have no idea of what, if anything, is under which shell. Does the political have to get better before the military can? Or is it the other way around? Or do both have to improve at the same time? Or are they making it up as they go?

In the Senate, multiple shell games are being played, with Democrats devising different formulas to cut funding or withdraw troops or rescind the 2002 war resolution, while Republicans look for ways to be in favor of ending the war but not just yet or not in any way that might come back to haunt them.

Before the month is out, dozens more of our young people will have died in Iraq and billions of dollars more gone down the drain while, in Washington, they will still be playing these games.

How long do they think they can keep snookering us? Even at carnivals, they sometimes give the suckers an even break.

What's Wrong With America's Newspapers?

If we had been fighting in Iraq 50 years ago, we might have never left. Back then, the morning printfest was the only game in town and, from the performance of American dailies today, there would have been no clamor to get out.

Today, some 51 months, 3600 military deaths and $441 billion after it started, a New York Times editorial finally says, “Enough.” Titled “The Road Home,” it begins: “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.”

The Times took its time deciding that, yet even so it is in the vanguard.

According to Editor & Publisher, “very few newspapers in the U.S. have endorsed a withdrawal from Iraq or even a timetable for that, despite the overwhelming shift in public opinion on that question. Momentum has started to shift in that direction, however, with a handful of papers --from the Los Angeles Times to, just this week, The Olympian in Washington--backing a pullout.”

Why has it taken so long? Have newspapers under corporate ownership lost touch with their communities and the pain this war has been inflicting on readers? Back when A.J. Liebling famously said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed to those who own one,” were benevolent publishers more empathic or more responsive?

Not in my long experience. Daily newspapers back then were just as out of touch with public sentiment, routinely endorsing Republican Presidential candidates in the overwhelmingly Democratic era of Roosevelt and Truman.

If there is an answer, it may be in the newspaper tradition of never getting too far ahead of, or in many cases, even abreast of its readers on controversial issues.

During the days of McCarthyism, Vietnam and even Watergate (with only Woodward and Bernstein the dazzling exception), magazines, book publishers and even network TV took the lead in delivering the bad news just as cable and bloggers have been doing about Iraq.

Marshall McLuhan said, “People don’t actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath.”

Finally the New York Times at least has decided it’s time for a cold shower.