[His] art of war is unknown...

"Horizon" don't beat "timeline". I mean, "Surge" beat "escalation," sure, but with a bigger stage, BHO's gonna call it tomayto-tomahto in that commonsensical way and that'll catch on. Horizon-potayto, timeline-potahto, he's been saying we should call the whole thing off the whole time.

Thing is, the semantics don't matter much, because we're seeing a repeat of what happened versus Hillary. Back in the debates, there was a stone-cold killer moment wherein one BHO, in the parlance of our times, "owned" one Hillary Clinton. An addendum, one supposes, is necessary for Ye Olde Dark Steer Theorem #4432: You underestimate Barry Hussein at your peril.

Walnuts, et al. got what they wanted: they'd raised the rhetoric to the point where BHO had to go to Iraq and make a big deal about it. Unfortunately for them, he used the opportunity to turn the trip into a global jetsetting romp wherein he... well... looks... presidential. Littman, over at HuffPo, gets it perfectly:

All John McCain has done, with his childish taunting of Obama, is create a situation where Obama has now gone overseas; been seen with General Petraeus smiling, looking Presidential; been photographed with world leaders who seem excited by the prospect of an Obama Presidency, and shown, by images, that he fits in just fine on the world stage; and, of course, Obama has taken all the media attention with him when McCain is desperate for media coverage.

If McCain's team wants any chance of winning, they've got to stop underestimating this man. He and his team are excellent at goading opponents into hubristically overplaying their hands--see frontheavy spending from Clinton camp and redfaced Bill Clinton. The dominant media narrative is that McCain's the one heavy on foreign policy cred. Well we've got a week plus of footage of BHO politickin' daily with diplomats and not just looking like he belongs, but exceeding expectations as he goes. Meanwhile, Walnuts looks the fool mixing up brown people geographies, all the while trying to figure out how he's going to address the issue that's going to dominate the political discourse this fall: the shit sandwich that is the Bush economy.

And, on that note, a question: The quieter Iraq gets, the more people focus on their pocketbooks; so is the prevailing wisdom that "progress" in the war is good news for Republicans...wrong?

We got it sewn, The Firm art of war is unknown
Lower your tone, face it, homicide cases get blown
Aristocrats, politickin daily with diplomats
See me I'm an official mack, Lex Coupe triple black
-AZ, "Affirmative Action"