But the thing that inadvertently plays into the anti war plans was the poor stagecraft of having a 100 man contingent bristling with armaments and combat helicopter cover cover a "stroll" and act like it was a day in Central Park.

So the public’s exhaustion with the Iraq war is not stopping the Republicans from lying. It’s just making to harder for people to swallow the lies. Putting on body armor, Representative Pence's iditiotic statement that this was a day like in Indiana in the park just sets in the consumers mind as a reminder that the more bullshit you smell, the more bullshit there is.

The facts on the ground in Iraq on that very day belie the disaster Iraq has become. You have to wonder why anyone tries to lie to the public about how bad it is. After 6 years of Karl Rove this was totally amateur hour.

...the civilian death toll rose 15 percent from February to March. Mosul, which was supposedly secured in 2003 by the current American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is now a safe haven for terrorists, according to an Iraqi government spokesman. The once-pacified Tal Afar, which Mr. Bush declared "a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq" in 2006, is a cauldron of bloodshed.

McCain made clear to everyone but the most willfully blind, that even a press conference can barely be staged anymore because the violence is so rampant.

This is what we have wrought. Michelle Malkin can go put on her helmet and spit her bigotry while she jets over to Baghdad all she wants. Folks there ARE NO good news tours through Iraq. And if you believe it really is OK over there then there is no help for you. But the rest of us, the vast majority of Americans see McCain’s Dukakis in a tank moment as the proof that not only is he increasingly out of touch with the public, it demonstrates how the American public is really in touch with the reality over there. That they can't be fooled anymore.

The center will not hold, no matter what happens in the Washington standoff over war funding. Surely no one understands better than Mr. McCain that American lives are being wasted in the war’s escalation. That is what he said on David Letterman’s show in an unguarded moment some five weeks ago — though he recanted the word wasted after taking flak the morning after. Like his Letterman gaffe, Mr. McCain’s ludicrous market stunt was at least in the tradition of his old brand of straight talk, in that it revealed the truth, however unintentionally. But many more have watched the constantly recycled and ridiculed spectacle of his "safe" walk in Baghdad than heard him on a late-night talk show. This incident has the staying power of the Howard Dean scream. Should it speed America’s disengagement from Iraq, what looks today like John McCain’s farcical act of political suicide may some day loom large as a patriot’s final act of sacrifice for his country.

This war is over except for the retreating. And that’s what’s left. A big fat retreat where we somehow get our tanks and armored vehicles back, where we show the public the vast permanent bases we built and hid from he public, and where we stop torturing and detaining people, and where we look ourselves in the faces and look at the blood on the streets, and we know what we have done. And then start the long slow process of healing. That's what's left.

Link here: http://select.nytimes.com/...