The Republicans and the mainstream press have worked hard in recent weeks to intentionally misconstrue Obama's consistent position on troop withdrawals from Iraq. They've tried to insinuate that his position has changed and that it'll be a tough sell to the American public. As Martha Raddatz of ABC News disingenuously put it,

Whatever nuance Barack Obama is now adding to his Iraq withdrawal strategy, the core plan on his Web site is as plain as day: Obama would "immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months.

Is the Democratic candidate's troop-withdrawal strategy plausible? It is a plan that, no doubt, helped Obama get his party's nomination, but one that may prove difficult if he is elected president.

Regardless of our mainstream press' presumptions about their role as the sole arbiters of plausibility in matters of Iraqi internal security, why not, just for fun, consider the opinion of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki? As Maliki recently said,

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.

While not specifically rejecting John McCain and his plans for an open-ended ("100 years") occupation, Maliki would only say,

Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.

ABC News and the Washington Post will either have to ignore the heck out of this shocking development, or find some other way to spin it so as to put Obama on the defensive. How else can they deal with such a direct and specific repudiation of everything they've been trying to sell us? The Iraqis are telling us it's time to go; can we not take "go" for an answer?

It seems like Obama has been way ahead of everyone on this issue, and now his rivals are scrambling to embrace his position while simultaneously trying to claim that he was wrong. But while the instigators of this Iraq fiasco are the ones who've been inconsistent about so much--whether it was why we were invading, how long it would take, how much it would cost or how to define success--we can at least say that they've been consistent in their bad faith and bad judgment. And now Maliki, in an innocent bit of "straight talk," is showing them up as the disingenuous, amateurish fools that they've been all along. But again, how will the mainstream media spin this to make it appear as anything less than their worst PR nightmare?