Live Blogging El Presidente's Hail Mary Pass

• What's the realistic sick joke here?
• Note the blue tie--a sop to Democrats?
• Who designed this backdrop? Some dickey-doo on the left edge of the screen looks like part of a hookah. Note the primary red theme in the bookshelves--sets off the dark suit.
• "The consequences of failure are clear." You're right, Chimpie. We see them every day, because failure has been occuring for quite a while now.
• Define "success." He talks as if only Baghdad matters. Is his plan to secure the city and cede the country?
• Oh, Christ--he wants to 'splain things to us.
• 18 Iraqi brigades plus local police patrolling Baghdad. Yes, there is definitely a positive precedent in the past 18 months.
• More than 20,000 Americans to be deployed, of which five brigades will embed with Iraqi units. There's something to look forward to.
  
• Why will this operation succeed? Because the "killers" realized that all they had to do was flow back into cleared areas. Does no one remember Vietnam?
• Ooooooh--a threat. Our commitment is not open-ended. "Now is the time to act." What we've just been fucking off for the last nearly four years?
• "...our television screens filled with death and murder." Hmmmm, why is that, I wonder?
• "...visible improvements to Iraqi neighborhoods." What the fuck was Halliburton, Brown and Root, Bechtel, et al doing all this time? Where's the money, dude?
• Speed the transition? Starting from what time?
• There, he admitted it--Iraq is on its way to becoming a base from which attacks on the U.S can be launched.
• 4000 military personnel for Anbar province. That should be pretty easy. It's only as big as North Carolina--roughly 53,000 square miles--and holds 1.4 million people. So that's, um, one additional GI per 13 sq. miles. That should settle the place down.
  
• Oh goody! Condi Rice is heading for Iraq on Friday. She's so competent...well, except for ignoring the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S." PDB, and admitting to never imagining someone using planes to attack buildings, and failing to show any progress anywhere on the diplomatic front in the Middle East. Yeah, she's perfect.
• The insurgents are without conscience? What about a sociopathic president who cannot say, "I screwed up"?
• Victory won't look like what our fathers experienced? I get it--we redefine victory to resemble Iraq as it is today. Hooray! We won!
• A withdrawal would cause mass deaths on an unimaginable scale? Yeah, the scale so far was expected, right?
• Oh, so now it's the Democrats who are failing to provide a solution. And he praises Lieberman, big surprise. God, how Joe must feel like he mistook an anchor for a life preserver when he tied his wagon to Bush's star. It's fun watching Joe-mentum slow into reverse.
• "...worthy of their sacrifice." How dare this AWOL jerkoff tell us about "sacrifice."
  
• What a fucking worthless 20 minutes. Now for screaming head analysis which will yield exactly zero light--more of my life down the drain. Only Olbermann has anything thoughtful to offer. Matthews makes me puke--I think of how lavishly and shamelessly he used to praise Bush. Some analyst.
• I gotta go throw up.