John Walsh writes a pretty weak post on Counterpunch about Al Franken's lies concering the war in Iraq. The lying trope is good because, of course, Franken wrote Lying Liars, and a good writer loves a hook. Walsh, on the other hand, makes a rookie mistake: Typically when you accuse someone of lying you generally want to be able to show that this someone is indeed saying the thing that is not. But unable to find any of Franken's actual lies, Walsh goes catholic on his ass and accuses Al of lies of omission. Well, Counterpunch is Alexander Cockburn's bailiwick so we shouldn't expect too much.

But, being a good liberal, I also should note that I actually agree with Walsh's larger point: the democratic party's complete inability to come up with some kind of coherent strategy concerning Iraq. In fact, I think it fair to say (and the idea's hardly original with me) that Kerry's pathetically lame campaign pledge to continue Bush's policy in Iraq, now with NEW! freshly added competency, cost him the election. That and the fools in my home state getting suckered into voting for Bush so that gays can't marry.

But, to return to my original point, what does Walsh expect? We just "butt out and call it even"? What's going on in Iraq is hardly pretty, but would it be prettier if Bagdad started to look like Darfur? Todd Gitlin makes a great point when he argues that the anti-war movement is absolutely adrift, precisely because it, unlike the naively certain Walsh, knows there is absolutely no good solution to the mess Bush has gotten us into.

Of course, if we could set the way back machine to early 2003, or even better, to before the midterm elections in 2002, collectively slap the dems up side the head and tell them in no uncertain terms that en masse we would never vote for another pro-war dem, we might have avoided the whole mess to begin with.

But that ain't gonna happen, either.