This piece says one smart thing and one stupid thing.

Yes, the gas price ad was dumb, as the writer recognizes.

But on this point he was dead wrong: his Surge attack was dumb too, and hence the writer's statement is dumb, because it buys into the fallacious arguments that:

1) The Surge is working, because it lowered our troops' death rate in Iraq.

a. Just because the death rate has decreased gradually after peaking in May 2007 (four months into the full-strength Surge, and even longer after the buildup started), doesn't mean that the Surge is the cause. There are many other factors for this, cited by experts (incuding military ones), such as the fact that we are paying protection money (a LOT of our citizens' $$) to the Sunnis, and the fact that many violent areas recently reached an ethnically-cleansed state (i.e. no more ethnically-opposed neighborhoods left to bomb).

b. Our troops are still dying and becoming damaged for life every week. Our money is still flowing into this occupation at a stunning rate, which could otherwise be applied to American security risks, economic concerns, etc. Iraq has demonstrated it will not be our puppet, does not support a long-term American presence, and is refuses complicity in selling off their country's resources to the oil corporations. Is this what McClone and his press buddies and their unthinking public call "working"?

2) Obama opposed the original invasion. Had Bush and McSame used the same degree of judgment and foreign relations wisdom, we would not have needed a Surge. We would have saved four thousand + of our soldiers' lives, saved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis' lives, prevented a huge security advantage for Iran, prevented the extreme growth in terrorist strength that has been observed by the experts, etc. Instead, these identical hugging political visionaries decided that we would have "an easy victory", etc. So the argument that McClown's judgment on these matters is somehow
better than Obama's really doesn't hold much water, if one just thinks about it critically with the facts at hand.