Ken Berwitz

Barack Obama and his people have spent the last week or so crowing about how right they were that troop strength in Iraq should be reduced, and assuring us that President Bush's current position (i.e. we may be able to accelerate troop reduction) is a case of him listening to the great and powerful Obama.

This was dramatically buttressed by the Der Speigel article which quoted Iraq's President Nouri al-Maliki as saying he agreed with Obama's position.

The problem?  none of the above "facts" are true.

Here is an excerpt from a very well written article by Mark Impomeni of www.redstate.com, laying it all out for us.  The bold print is mine:

We now know that Maliki did not endorse Obama's withdrawal timeline. The headline writer at Der Spiegel did. What Maliki did was call for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq as early as possible. That's no surprise announcement from an elected head of state with political considerations, and it is certainly no surprise from Maliki, who has been calling for an end to the occupation almost since he was sworn in.

Obama opposed the surge. He said that he was "not persuaded" that an additional 20,000 U.S. troops would have any impact on the level of violence. He campaigned on his opposition to the surge in the primaries. And he said that the surge was not succeeding . Indeed, Obama's entire campaign is based on his supposed superior judgment, which is based his opposition to the Iraq war from the beginning; although he was not in a position to have to take a meaningful vote on the war at the time. For Obama to now claim vindication for his arbitrary timetable based on the remarks of a man who would not be able to make such demands were it not for the success of the very strategy that Obama opposed, is a bit much. Obama did not all of a sudden become the man with the plan in Iraq because the elected leader there sought to curry favor with his constituents and a potential future American president by paying a lip service compliment to the latter's public position.

It was McCain who advocated for the surge long before it was announced, angering many on the right with his routine and unnecessary attacks on former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who McCain sees as responsible for all things that have gone wrong in Iraq. It is McCain who has campaigned on his belief that withdrawals must be conditions-based, not arbitrarily ordered based on politics. And it has been McCain who has often remarked that he would rather lose the election than lose the war . McCain stands to benefit from any positive news from Iraq. Maliki's call for a timetable for withdrawal, had it happened, would have been the end result of the strategy McCain authored, championed, and stood by.Besides, it didn't happen. Maliki's spokesman says that the prime minister's remarks were, "misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately."

It will be a clear measure of just how over-the-top biased media are if they ignore this.  I'm betting that, for the most part, they do.

My first inkling was when my wife put on NBC to watch the Today Show this morning and they did news briefs.  One of them was that al-Maliki had endorsed the Obama's plan but then, after being pressured by the White House, revised his position.

NBC offered exactly no proof of or even circumstantial evidence of the White House doing any such thing.  No need to, sheeple, you're just supposed to believe what we tell you.

I have one question about this:  If, knowing what the White House reaction would be, Nouri al-Maliki felt strong enough to actually endorse Mr. Obama's position, how could they have pressured him to change it?  By doing what? 

See my point?