All irrelevant nonsense about the poetic “citizen of the world” reference aside, it’s hard to see Obama’s Berlin speech as anything but momentous. In large part it is because of the message, both the plain message and the underlying one: while fiercely patriotic to America, the speech was also welcoming and accepting to the world. What Obama did, in part, was to roll back the clock, bring us back to the days after 9/11, and showed what Bush should have done, and in lieu of that, what people around the world will not only accept but strongly desire–that we do our best to erase the past seven years and start over again with new hope and optimism. Even as he outlined the challenges and dangers and called for sacrifice, he evoked an image of international community with America at its center which should have been the legacy of 9/11, instead of the Iraq War and relative American isolationism which have so richly rewarded Osama bin Laden’s efforts. This speech in Berlin marked a desire to change all of that, and to bring the world closer together. It showed that America can again become a respected world leader.

But from a different, more specific perspective, it was momentous in another way: it showed the kind of president Barack Obama can be and the kind of president John McCain cannot be. McCain might complain about the coverage Obama has been getting on this trip, but what he cannot deny is that Obama did it all, with no favors or favoritism from anyone else. McCain either couldn’t or, more likely, did not even try to make his past trips this momentous, he probably could not have generated the interest and focus, and imagining him up there in Germany giving that speech almost evokes an incredulous chuckle. But it comes back to the point: McCain never even tried. He didn’t think to do something like this, just like Bush did not do when he should have back in 2001. All he thinks of is stuff like visiting American cities named “Berlin” as a cheesy theatrical trick, while releasing increasingly negative ads and coming close to calling Obama a traitor who wants to lose the Iraq War. Compare that with Obama’s travels and his magnificent speech in Berlin, and McCain looks like a cheap, petty huckster compared to Obama’s statesman.

The media machine will have to work overtime to dispel this truth and prop up McCain as someone who somehow is a credible presidential candidate.

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McCain’s flub about the Surge being responsible for the Anbar Awakening was bad enough, but wait until you hear his exquisitely contorted backpedaling on why he didn’t misspeak–it’s gotta be a prize-winner, for sure.

First of all, a surge is really a counterinsurgency strategy, and it’s made up of a number of components. And this counterinsurgency was initiated to some degree by Colonel McFarland in Anbar province relatively on his own. When I visited with him in December of 2006, he had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counterinsurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is, quote, the surge, part of the surge, would be successful. So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this counterinsurgency.

Prior to that, they had been going into places, killing people or not killing people, and then withdrawing. And the new counterinsurgency — surge — entailed clearing and holding, which Colonel McFarland had already started doing. And then of course later on there were additional troops, and General Petraeus has said that the surge would not have worked and the Anbar Awakening would not have taken place successfully if they hadn’t had an increase in the number of troops. So I’m not sure, frankly, that people really understand that a surge is part of a counterinsurgency strategy, which means going in, clearing, holding, building a better life, providing services to the people, and then clearly a part of that, an important part of it, was additional troops to help ensure the safety of the sheikhs, to regain control of Ramadi, which was a very bloody fight, and then the surge continued to succeed, and that counterinsurgency.

Got that? The Surge™ really happened months before we ever heard of it, executed by General McFarland, who confided this secret Surge™ to John McCain personally; the “Surge™” is not a “surge” in the number of soldiers, which is what everyone, including President Bush, has been saying it was, instead it was short for “counterinSURGEncy,” which one can only suppose we WEREN’T doing until late 2006, and it was this special McCain-McFarland McSurge™ which was responsible for everything coming up McRoses™.

If that ain’t the most twisted, frakked-up, sorry-ass excuse for a cover-your-ass rationale to explain off a huge gaffe, then I don’t know what is.

Well, there was McCain just a few days ago claiming that he knew what Maliki and the Iraqis wanted better than Maliki and the Iraqis, and that their repeated statements about endorsing Obama’s withdrawal plan was just confusion as McCain knew what they really wanted, which was what McCain has been pushing for, of course. Silly Iraqis.

There is just so much wrong with McCain’s Surge™ obfuscation that it’s not funny. He claims the surge helped in Anbar, when the counterinsurgency actions he described took place primarily in Baghdad, and claims that the Surge™ was what protected the sheiks who started the Anbar Awakening, though the sheik most responsible for starting the Awakening, Abu Risha, was assassinated at the height of the Surge™ (the Surge™ we all know about, not the surge before the Surge™).

American MSM’s reaction: we’ll have to see, but I am guessing it will be the same old usual “nothing to see here!”

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In Japan, a lot of signs are in English, especially for travel. You have almost all traffic signs with English translations at the bottom, and what street signs there are usually have English as well. And virtually every train station sign has English translations, from the signs hanging from the ceiling directing you to different parts of stations, to the signs at each station telling you which station it is. Many train lines even have English versions of the recorded announcements declaring which station you’re at.

One glaring exception to the bilingual rule: signs above ticket vending machines. The signs tell you the price to each station and the name–but in Japanese only. And station names tend to be some of the hardest things to make out in Japanese. Why they never include English, even written in tiny letters, is beyond me. Not that it’s a problem for me–I can read the kanji well enough–but it makes it very hard for tourists and relatively new residents to get the right ticket when going to an unfamiliar place.

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There is a kind of restaurant in Japan where, instead of ordering to a waiter, or ordering your food at the counter, you buy a tickets for the items of food you want, turn them in at the counter, and pick up your food. Makes sense in a way, but it really feels cafeteria-ish, too much so for a mainstream restaurant experience. But these are fairly common in Japan, at least enough so that you have a good chance of spotting one on any given day.

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We seem to be getting lots of big quakes in northern Japan. About a half hour ago, Sachi and I felt a rather strong one, which made the furniture shift a little for a few seconds, and doors creaked for a few minutes. Seemed pretty strong even here, and yet it was 300 miles (480 km) distant, up in Iwate, near Morioka (probably hitting less than 30 miles away, though the greatest effect was in various places, maybe because the quake had a depth of about 110 km). The magnitude, originally reported at about 7.2, is now rated as a 6.8 on the Richter scale.

This differs from recent big quakes in that it hit on land, and not too far from populated areas. Since it hit about a half hour after midnight, it might be a bit before we hear about the real damage done.

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Obama is coming across as very presidential and right on all the important issues in Iraq; Bush is now courting Obama’s timeline while pretending not to, as Iraq’s leadership clearly shows preference for Obama’s withdrawal plans–and McCain is left to pretend to a gullible media that he knows better than the Iraqis what it is they want. McCain and Bush are shifting toward Obama’s long-held position that we should shift away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan.

And Obama does an excellent job stating that he is not “ignoring the generals” unless he does exactly what they say; the whole “following the generals” claptrap has always been Bush’s way of borrowing the brass’ credibility because he himself has none, as well as for passing the buck and shifting the blame. “I am following the generals’ advice” has always been an excuse and a dodge, not a virtue. Obama clarifies, saying that its the generals’ job to advise, but it’s the president’s job to see the greater scope of things and make the final decisions (you know, to be a “decider”)–and the generals then implement the strategy the president dictates. That’s how it’s actually supposed to work, not this “how dare you go against the generals” BS.

Meanwhile, McCain, in an interview with CBS News, made a much bigger gaffe than his previous statement suggesting that Iraq and Afghanistan Pakistan share a border. This time, he stated that the Surge™ was responsible for the “Anbar Awakening,” despite the fact that the Anbar Awakening happened four months before the Surge™ was even announced, and even longer before the troops started arriving. But McCain claims that the Anbar Awakening’s debt to the Surge™ is “just a matter of history.”

The cover-up: CBS broadcast the question, but edited out McCain’s gaffe reply (h/t to Tim), instead editing in a different answer to make it look like McCain wasn’t a blundering buffoon. What kind of news agency catches a presidential candidate in a huge, glaring gaffe and then edits it to make it look like he made no gaffe?? And this, the “liberal” CBS?

While we’re talking about the Surge™, let’s note one more time that the Surge’s™ “success” is accidental–they lucked out, big time, as not only the Anbar Awakening softened up the ground, but that the cease-fire called by al Sadr caused the resulting decrease in violence–and the Surge™ simply happened to start at a time when we could take advantage of these independent developments. It’s the classic “Homer” success–you make a move which by all rights should end in disaster, but then fate intervenes to bring you success. The Surge™ was not a success because of McCain’s brilliant planning, he just happened to luck out, big-time, as the confluence of events in Iraq made a bad decision into a good one purely by accident.

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It seems to work just fine; the last three posts were made using the iPhone. You can easily sign in to your blog, get the last x-number of posts (default is 30), edit posts, and make new ones. When you make a new one, you enter the title, decide a category and tags, and then tap out the post. You add pictures from the library or by snapping a photo on the spot, adding as many photos as you like.

Down points: typing in HTML commands is laborious because of all the special characters, like angled brackets; however, you can type those in first, then add the text part using the loupe tool.

Photo preview leaves something to be desired; you can’t pinch or rotate to see the whole image before posting it, you only get a general idea unless the image is naturally in portrait mode, and even then you can’t zoom for detail from within the app. Not can you crop the image, which is a big problem as the iPhone camera doesn’t zoom.

When you add photos, you can’t place them where you want them–they get tacked on to the end of the post. This can be worked around by posting the images first, then editing the post (which has the HTML for the images), placing text around the images. When editing, you can add more photos (only to the new end of the post).

The images are of a pre-set size, 300 pixels wide in landscape mode. The workaround: the actual image is 640 x 480, and you can post-edit to change the image size relatively easily.

You also have to have your images placed in the default location–I had mine place in a special location, and the images did not appear in my first tests.

All of these are relatively minor nits, and as stated, most have relatively easy workarounds. As you could see from the most recent post before this one, I was able to liveblog pretty handily, and it worked just fine. This is also version-1 software, so there are bound to be several rough spots. So overall, I would say this is pretty nice software, and I’ll use it fairly often. Expect me to blog on the road a lot more from now on.

Future feature needs: a menu to insert HTML commands, better image management (cropping and choice of image size would be big improvements), and access to comments.

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Mr. Iwai is with us right now, giving his lecture on his experiences in the Tokko-tai, the suicide squadrons in WWII. Mr. Iwai was an officer in this squadron who trained others to use manned torpedoes and diving suits to attck Allied vessels.

Mr. Iwai is 88 years of age, and full of energy. He has begun by explaining the weapons used,such as the torpedoes used by the pilots.

We have a full house tonight, perhaps 70-80 people.

Mr. Iwai himself was not one of the suicide pilots himself, but he trained and traveled with the pilots. Health problems and supply of boats prevented him from operating as one of the pilots. While he was training to perform himself, he was transferred out of the squadron.

Mr. Iwai then transferred into a new unit, one that used little more than primitive diving suits with mines attached to bamboo poles.

After practicing this technique, Mr. Iwai came to feel that this way of attacking vessels would be worthless. The suits made it impossible to look upwards, as the balance of the suits forced the wearers to lean forward and look down. Nevertheless, as officers in the Imperial Navy, they were expected to perform even if the orders were foolish.

Because of flaws in the suit design, sometimes a corrosive liquid would flow through the air hoses and fill the helmets of the divers, burning their faces and throats, killing them. Mr. Iwai says that about fifty young men died in this way, though records of these events were burned after the end of the war.

He ends with a message that Japan was committing a kind of crime against it’s own people, reminding us strongly of what nations to to their own in times of war. His intention here tonight primarily, however, is to let the young students here understand that these acts are not to be seen as an example to follow, but as terrible acts forced upon the soldiers, in an unjustified war. While the acts of sacrifice made by the soldiers was in itself beautiful and much worthy of respect, the war itself was wrong and should never have taken place.

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I saw these keys at a stand underground on Shinjuku this afternoon. Had never seen anything like this before, but in Japan’s cute-conscious market, this kind of product definitely makes sense.

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Just don’t try leaping off of tall buildings or anything, OK?

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Not only did Maliki endorse Obama’s Iraq strategy if not Obama himself, not only was it not a mistranslation, not only has Maliki been saying the same basic thing for the past two weeks, not only did Maliki and his office repeat the endorsement of Obama’s plan after meeting with the candidate, but aside from all this, it looks like Maliki’s office approved of the original Spiegel interview in the first place, verifying that Spiegel’s translation was perfectly fine.

Not that it matters. The Liberal Media™ have the phoney-baloney “correction” from a Maliki staffer who was pressured by the U.S. into make a statement which, though nebulous, cast even the slightest shred of doubt about Maliki’s endorsement of a withdrawal of US troops by 2010. So, despite the overwhelming evidence that Maliki’s position is in support of Obama, the official view in the US media is that it “could have been” (read: was) a “mistranslation”–and most Americans, if asked, would probably report having received that impression. Which is all McCain needed to defuse what would otherwise have been an unmitigated disaster for his campaign–thanks to the complicity of the US media which, according to McCain, are “favoring” Obama.

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OK, finally. The WordPress for iPhone app came out, but I had to wait until I could upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress… the problems that arose because of which are detailed below. But the entire post below was written on the iPhone, so the thing works. This post is not written on the iPhone, for a very simple reason: it’s not easy to type on the iPhone. It is, of course, far easier and far faster than using a numeric keypad on a normal cell phone, and I’m getting pretty fast at it… but it’s still a pain in the butt if you want to input a substantial amount of data.

[A side note: I am getting very used to the iPhone's predictive correction mode, so much so that I subconsciously expect it to help me out when typing on my laptop or desktop machines--and then I am annoyed to remember that the feature does not work on those machines. Why not?]

Other problems: entering HTML commands is a pain, as the angled brackets needed are two shift-screens away–you essentially have to type the angled brackets and other stuff like slashes beforehand, then go back and fill in the alphanumeric stuff, otherwise you’re spending all your time getting into and out of shift modes. WordPress could add a killer feature by placing an HTML tag menu in the input screen–tap once to see the choices, tap the selection and it inputs the HTML. Hard to understand why they did not include this feature in the first place.

But all kvetching aside, it’s a nice app, and I plan to use it from time to time. It’s just that its entry was marred by very poor planning on WordPress’ part.

Alas, it is past one in the morning here, so doing a photo blog test wouldn’t make much sense. I’ll see if I can’t add something tomorrow, though I’ll be pretty darn busy most of the day. Tomorrow is the Tokko lecture, Mr. Tadamasa Iwai (former WWII suicide pilot) telling us about his experiences and his outlooks. For those of you interested, the information to attend (it’s free) is on this page.

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Well, the blog is up and running… no thanks to WordPress. The bastards made the upgrade sound easy, and just neglected to mention that anyone upgrading from and old enough version would have all of their category data erased. Completely.

As a result, I had to spend more than two hours laboriously poring through data files, retyping and filling in category names and slugs… twice. And I have 52 categories in this blog.

That WordPress has not fixed this or even made a note of it in the install read-me file is downright irresponsible… especially because they could easily warn of a simple workaround. Obviously, this problem does not happen when upgrading sequentially, but only when jumping, as in going from 2.2 to 2.6. Clearly, had I installed 2.4 before installing 2.6, or something like that, I would have been saved a few hours of hassle and grief.

So, thanks a bunch, you WordPress clowns.

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I’m about to upgrade my WordPress software, and so am leaving this notice just in case things go wrong. If they do, check back after a bit and I should have it sorted out…

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Apple has a huge hit in the iPhone 3G, which is selling out worldwide. The App Store is just as big a hit. iPod sales are still up, so no cannibalization by the iPhone. And Macs are selling like hotcakes, with Apple market share shooting up, sales and profits bigger than ever before, beating expectations. And Apple has “several new products” that will be released in the next few months, including some ultra-cool new gadget that’s still hush-hush.

So how does the market react? Apple’s stock tumbles 11%, down $17 per share after hours.

Why? Because Apple said it’s current quarter might not be as good as expected. Which is what Apple says pretty much every quarter, and every time they do better than expected.

Maybe it’s just the shaky market in general making speculators nervous, but I swear that these guys are economic hypochondriacs–if they got news that their heart is in great condition, their blood pressure excellent, their respiratory and digestive systems A-OK, and the doc gives them a life expectancy of 110… but the doc mentions that they should cut down on fatty foods, just to be safe, they’d burst a blood vessel panicking.

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John McCain said that he knows, better apparently than Maliki himself, what Maliki and the Iraqis want. Forget the multiple times Maliki has said he wants almost exactly what Obama is proposing. Forget the fact that Maliki has made a few more trips to Iraq than McCain and so maybe knows a bit more about what Iraq–not to mention Maliki himself–wants. No sirree, McCain has made so many PR jaunts to Iraq, has been babysat by enough G.I.s and has done enough P.R. photoshoots with Iraqi officials that he knows what Maliki and the Iraqis want better then they do themselves.

After all, he’s the expert: he knows that there’s a very hard struggle going on along the Iraqi-Pakistan border. I believe that will be the venue of his next Middle East trip, in fact.

Meanwhile, here’s a concise summary of how the media glosses over McCain’s “expertise.” After all, the man is solid–he never flip-flops.

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Sometimes it is really easy to get depressed about how brazenly the media bias shows through, as if they’re not really trying to hide it any more. When the report came out from Spiegel about his support of Obama’s plan, there was virtual silence–it took hours for U.S. media outliets to start reporting on the story, despite the fact that the White House inadvertently sent out a media alert (intended to be only in-house) to all the major news services concerning the story.

And yet, media stories only started to come out in force when the U.S. government goaded a rather strange “correction” from the Maliki government. It is now common knowledge that the White House had to specifically prod the Iraqis to make the statement, and the fact that it was released through a U.S. military news outlet made that all too clear. The statement itself claimed a “mistranslation,” though the nature of such a mistranslation was never provided, and could have meant that the substance of Maliki’s statement was correct but some side details were incorrectly stated.

Never mind all that–when the U.S. media started playing the story in earnest, it was on the theme of “Maliki: Mistranslated?” rather than reporting his support for Obama’s plan. And now that he New York Times has the tape and has given their own translation, the media will almost certainly (a) have moved on, as a pro-Obama story holds little interest for the close dog race they desire, and/or (b) will focus on differing word choice between the two translations as if it confirmed a “mistranslation,” despite the fact that the NYT translations comes out with Maliki saying essentially the same thing.

Watching ABC News’ webcast last night was one example of coloring the story rather blatantly. They used the bogus “mistranslation” claim as they focus of the story and report it as something potentially bad for Obama, showing the large title “LOST IN TRANSLATION?” throughout the whole story.

This is a media which has forgiven Bush fifty or so Watergate-level scandals… a media which ignores dozens of McCain flip-flops, some being complete reversals within days or weeks, usually with juicy videotape to exemplify a blatant flip-flop… a media which has completely ignored the undeniable, fully-evidenced fact that John McCain is and has been for months in direct violation of campaign finance law, and that the Bush White House fired the only FEC commissioner with the guts to say anything about it… this is the media which ignores Phil Gramm calling Americans “whiners” but covers Obama’s “bitter” statement for months, which calls even the slightest policy shifts by Obama “flip flops” outright.

You know very well that had Maliki made a statement repudiating Obama’s plan, calling it a “mistake,” then we would now be in Day Two of a month-long media frenzy about how Obama doesn’t know from foreign policy. Instead, we have both McCain and Bush copying Obama’s foreign policy, adopting it themselves but calling it different names (I mean, really, “time horizon”? How dumb do you have to be to not see through that?), and yet the media pretty much ignores it–instead, we get ABC calling Bush’s Obama-mirroring timeline plan “exactly what Bush wanted,” as if that’s what Bush was trying for all along, and how it’s not what Obama has been pushing for more than a year now.

Like I said, it’s rather depressing. One can only imagine that on a level playing field, where both candidates accomplishments and embarrassments were given equal play, Obama would be ahead by double digits in every poll. That he’s still ahead at all in this media environment is nothing short of a miracle.

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WordPress is finally coming out with their iPhone blogging client app. TypePad has had theirs out since day one, and while it’s only been a week and a half, I’ve been impatiently awaiting WordPress’. Being able to snap a photo and blog on it immediately from the street will be a nice addition to this blog, so I’m looking forward to it. Don’t know how much I’ll use it, but I can imagine a lot that could be done… once I stop being too busy with work to do too much with it.

Certainly it’ll be nice when Sachi and I visit countryside spas and there’s no Internet connection where we stay. The iPhone’s built-in Safari was already good enough for basic blogging, but in a kludgy way. This new interface should be much nicer.

See WordPress’ video for the new app below.

The announcement today says that the app has been uploaded to the App Store, and only awaits Apple’s clearance for it to be available. I have heard that it will be free, but not from any official source.

On a side note, has anyone noticed there is only a relative trickle of new apps since the store opened ten days ago? Hopefully that’ll change to more of a flood soon… or myabe my expectations are just way too high.

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This one hit stronger and faster than before… This is immediately reported as a 6.5, same location as the 7.0 we got hit with the other day.

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Naturally, this came out in the lefty blogs, and was virtually absent from the MSM sites for several hours:

Iraq Leader Maliki Supports Obama’s Withdrawal Plans

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Barack Obama’s 16 timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports US presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded “as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned.” He then continued: “US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

This is a HUGE story; the Bush administration’s own man in charge of Iraq has voiced support for Obama’s plan, repudiating McCain, who said that he would honor Maliki’s wishes were he to ask for a withdrawal:

Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world.

A McCain spokesman said as much just a few weeks ago:

John McCain has always been clear that American forces operate in Iraq only with the consent of that country’s democratically elected government.

So, that’s that, right? Maliki was elected, he supports Obama’s plan, and as McCain has also said that being on the ground in Iraq is the ultimate credibility, you can’t get much more credible than the Iraqi PM. Right? McCain? McCain?

“His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out,” said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The military says ‘conditions based’ and Maliki said ‘conditions based’ yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.”

Ah, I see. He’s just saying it to please the voters, but really he backs McCain, trust us!

Actually, the question here is, where is the MSM? Reluctant to print this breaking story for several hours, their coverage in print has been muted. This is a huge, major, ground-breaking blow to McCain and a big, unambiguous boost for Obama on a topic which is McCain’s strongest area, an area he’s been blasting Obama on relentlessly.

I just watched CNN’s top headlines: not a single mention of Maliki. They mentioned Obama in Afghanistan, but not this story. I also saw the start of their main political show, This Week in Politics, and their top story is the economy, no mention of Iraq. This is rather mind-boggling, even after factoring in the MSM’s willingness to shill for McCain.

Just last night, I was watching the web edition of ABC news, and they were playing the weaselly-worded “Time Horizon” as being a “victory for Bush,” as if it weren’t a plainly obvious and evasive way of saying “timetable” or “time line,” and effectively switching to Obama’s position while trying not to look like it.

And now, reports are coming out saying that Maliki was “misunderstood and mistranslated”; a Maliki spokesman said that Maliki’s statement had not been “as not conveyed accurately regarding the vision of Senator Barack Obama, U.S. presidential candidate, on the timeframe for U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq,” and gave this incredibly nebulous statement:

Al-Dabbagh explained that Mr. al-Maliki confirmed the existence of an Iraqi vision stems from the reality with regard to Iraq security needs, as the positive developments of the security situation and the improvement witnessed in Iraqi cities makes the subject of U.S. forces’ withdrawal within prospects, horizons and timetables agreed upon and in the light of the continuing positive developments on the ground, and security that came within the Strategic Plan for Cooperation which was laid and developed by Mr. Maliki and President George Bush. The Iraqi government appreciates and values the efforts of all the friends who continue to support and supporting Iraqi security forces.

Al-Dabbagh underscored that the statements made by the head of the ministerial council (Prime Minister al-Maliki) or any of the members of the Iraqi government should not be understood as support to any U.S. presidential candidates.

Hmm… first of all, the source was the U.S. military’s press office, a strange place for the Iraqi PM’s office to release a statement. Second, I don’t see where the mistranslation could occur in a statement like this:

“SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business. But it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that’s where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.”

The spokesman quoted by the U.S. military site did not specify what the specific “mistranslation” error was, and we’ll probably get the direct text in the original language from Spiegel soon enough. At first glance, I would say that this is little more than emergency damage control–get a loyal flunky to make a statement that can then be used to give some sort of credible argument that what happened didn’t actually happen.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops. But one McCain ally seems to have it quintessentially boiled down to just a few words:

Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, “We’re fucked.”

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