Tuesday Roundup: Bush Sneaks Into Iraq

That George sure is a sneaky one! GW made the headlines by appearing at an Iraqi air base yesterday. More notable, though, was the statement he made there: that we may see fewer American forces in Iraq.

Now, don't get your hopes up — he was not talking about an end to the war:

"Gen. [David] Petraeus and Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker tell me if the kind of success we're now seeing continues, it will be possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces," Bush said during remarks at Al Asad Air Base in Anbar province.

And he's adamant to state that there's no promise of when that would happen. After all we've been through with this conflict, it really seems like more of a pandering PR move than an actual commitment to withdrawal. Fortunately, that's not the case:

The White House denied the trip was a publicity visit ahead of a report about U.S. troop increases in Iraq to be delivered by Petraeus next week in Washington.

Well, that settles that, then.

Apparently, soldiers in Iraq aren't quite as rosy about our current situation as higher-ups are, though: some seem to think the areas on display to visiting generals and politicians are a "false representation" of the situation in the country. Not that any congressional visitors would be able to notice that the representation is inaccurate; after all, they're too busy being caught by surprise by smear campaigns trying to turn the troops against them. No one has yet identified the source of those smear pamphlets.

In other Iraq news, USA Today does some investigative reporting on the repeated reluctance by the administration to provide for troop security and how most of those initiatives have stemmed from Congress, and McClatchy notes that as Bush makes his positive prognostications in Iraq, British troops are already pulling out.

The summer break is over, and Congress is back in session today. The Hill reports on their return, and on the impending fight over a number of pending appropriations bills that Bush plans to veto.

But more so than Congress being back in session, the media is clearly pumped about Labor Day's historical delineation of the "real" start to the presidential race. Hillary Clinton has spent the last few days putting some miles on her brand new stump speech, which trims her message down to four major talking points — in other words, a stump speech the likes of which everyone would be wise to have with the post-Labor Day campaign rush beginning. Instead, Obama has apparently made his new stump message "Hillary's stump message isn't going far enough," which not only sounds much like his old stump message, but ends up defining him in her terms. A bit of free advice (worth as much as you paid for it, I'm sure): if you want to run for president, you have to sound presidential at some point. That probably doesn't involve saying "I'm more Clinton than Clinton!"

The Washington Post take the opportunity of the Labor Day kickoff to give answers to some of the most salient questions campaigns have to deal with in the next few months. I remember reading through the article and thinking how astute all the observations seemed — I thought it was astoundingly good analysis for a media outlet. Then I reread the opening and realized they were actually printing opinions of campaign strategists from around the U.S. I don't know exactly how I feel about that. I have to say it was kind of exciting to think that this insightful analysis was coming from the mainstream media. But then again, as long as they're running it, is there a fundamental difference in effect?

Swing and independent/unaffiliated voters were a popular subject in the news yesterday; The LA Times and McClatchy both study their importance in the upcoming election and current trends. Interestingly, both mention Clinton as a polarizing figure that would lose the vote of swing ex-Republicans that would otherwise consider voting for a Democrat.

The Dallas Morning News, continuing in their mission to confuse me over whether their editorial board is liberal or conservative, published a Labor Day editorial on how immigrant labor is fundamental to America's economy. The Statesman runs an interesting set of statistics looking at the number of state employees and how they compare in numbers and demographics to private sector employees.

Finally today: Apparently, the Texas Minutemen have expanded their mission to keep brown people out of Texas. No longer are they limited to being a self-assigned secondary border patrol; now they are monitoring and photographing day laborers and contractors in the North Texas area. They put the photos online, and write the contractors telling them that hiring illegal immigrants is against the law. The instant photograph-based Social Security checks they must be implementing to know who to accuse of that are apparently a Texas Minutemen trade secret. But at least they're not violent. Mostly.

Some Minutemen have been arrested, but Gilchrist said it was their opponents who provoked confrontations by throwing rocks or other forms of physical intimidation.

So the immigrant day laborers were the ones being violent, and yet the Minutemen were the ones hauled off by the cops? They must live in a different Texas than I do.