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Chris Matthews actually asks his panel if the country is going to be feeling some nostalgia for the Bush years after Dubya has someone ghost write his memoirs. I'm not sure what is more disturbing, the answers the panel gave or that Matthews felt the need to ask the question in the first place.

Matthews: Welcome back. On Friday George W. Bush said his memoir comes out this November. That will be two years since Barack Obama’s victory which some say was a repudiation of the Bush years and that brings us to this question. Will there be George W. Bush nostalgia this November when his book comes out? Kelly?

O’Donnell: Well every president gets a bit of that and I think the more George Bush is not visible, is not talking now; the more there will be interest in what he had to say.

Matthews: Will there be nostalgia?

O’Donnell: For some there will be.

Matthews: Okay, David Ignatius…

Ignatius: It depends on large part on where things are in Iraq. If after the election next month Iraq looks stable a lot of people are going to say, you know we weren’t comfortable with it at the time but George Bush was right.

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I used to respect David Ignatius and enjoy his columns. I enjoyed his narration between Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski in "America and the World." Then he took a few helicopter rides with Gen. Petraeus and I think they replaced him with a pod person. That's the only rationale I can think of with his recent comments about President Obama's speech about an Afghanistan strategy.

Military commanders appear comfortable with Obama's decision, although they wish it hadn't taken so long.

You mean that after six years of asking for reinforcements, to include the immediate predecessor to Gen. McChrystal, that the military officers are upset about six-month strategy review? Hmmmmm.

The most important question about Obama's strategy isn't political but pragmatic: Will it succeed? He has defined success downward, by focusing on the ability to transfer control to the Afghans. He shows little interest in the big ideas of counterinsurgency and insists he will avoid "a nation-building commitment in Afghanistan." That will make it easier to declare a "good enough" outcome in July 2011, if not victory.

What exactly did Ignatius think was the point of military operations in Afghanistan if not to create the conditions where the Afghans could take charge of their own security? Did he think that we were just supposed to coddle the Afghani security forces forever, or until we kill every living Taliban? President Obama doesn't show interest in COIN because IT'S AN OPERATIONAL TACTIC - that's what the generals are paid to do. He just tells them what the end result is supposed to be, and whatever he decides is "good enough" is what we call victory conditions. It's not a hard concept.

Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act together at last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a certain date, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That's the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision -- the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.

Yeah, it's not as if setting a deadline worked in Iraq, right? Oh wait, it did. If we set the conditions for leaving, it does, at the least, allow the US government to plan resources and understand that this isn't an endless death spiral. It does force Karzai and company to understand that they won't have the US military as the palace guard forever. Here's a newsflash for David - the goal is al Qaeda. The Taliban aren't taking flying lessons or planning to smuggle themselves into the United States. We need to stop thinking that every nation needs the US military to hold their hand, and maybe, just maybe, people who live in a country can actually make a way toward their own goals and ambitions (even if they aren't the same as our own).

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There are so many things wrong with this panel discussion on the Chris Matthews Show, it's hard to decide where to begin, but for starters, Andrea Mitchell seems to be the only one that gets it that some happy talk on increasing our troop presence in Afghanistan is not going to satisfy the left. Chris Matthews seems to take absolute glee in the fact that escalating our presence there is going to piss off those of us who are anti-war and thinks that “the center” of this country is pro-war.

Joe Klein thinks that President Obama’s bigger problems are going to be from the screeching right that are not going to support him no matter what he does and that of course the left is going to have to suck it up if the President does something they don’t agree with. As John has said here repeatedly, the Villagers always think it’s a good thing if Obama alienates his base and that we should all sit quietly and STFU when we don't agree with his policies.

I’ll wait to hear what the President has to say on Tuesday rather than second guess him as the media has, but playing the middle and sending more troops rather than getting our military out of Afghanistan is not going to satisfy any of us who don’t think we belonged there in the first place. The people who attacked us on 9-11 were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan, but we didn’t invade and occupy that country.

Matthews: And finally the President said he will say how much it’s going to cost. Anne it’s amazing. I’ve never heard of going to war but saying how much is it going to cost. It’s like that old saying if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

Kornblut: Well, the White House would say the opposite, that we haven’t asked until now and they have to finally start taking it into account. They’ve actually broken down the numbers to figure out how many per soldier it would be. You know half a million dollars a year to have them there, so at this point they’re taking it into account and they’re measuring it against the other important priorities, like health care, like the other domestic achievements they want to get done.

Matthews: Andrea isn’t it odd we’re talking about the cost of this war and we’re already in it?

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Chris Matthews takes his best shot at attempting to turn President Obama into Jimmy Carter. This from the man who said this about George Bush when he decided to play dress up on the aircraft carrier:

MATTHEWS: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

I guess Obama needs to get himself a cowboy outfit and do some brush clearing or a flight suit and play war hero and maybe Tweety will be impressed.

Transcrict via Nexis Lexis.

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust. And Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carter-esque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the emperor of Japan, an unforced error, say the critics. Then there was--there was what happened in China. Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there despite playing the polite visitor. And his effort to speak directly to the Chinese was jammed by the government. Third, that decision to try the terrorists up in that federal court in New York City. Again, nothing had to be done, and critics say--the critics say it shows that Obama, his team doesn't understand this is a war we're in.

David, that's the question. These optics are everything in a presidency. Carter used to carry that garment bag over his shoulder. This president, is he making mistakes like in China, like in Japan?

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The Villagers on the Chris Matthews panel all agree on a couple of points. The dirty f-ing hippies on the left have no right to demand anything of President Obama and were silly to think he’d live up to his campaign promise to reform our health care system. And two, any bill, whether it’s terrible or not that the President signs will be “transformational” and “historic”.

It doesn’t matter to them if it’s a crap sandwich which ends up being nothing but a giveaway to the insurance industry. What matters is that it passes. Andrea Mitchell seems positively giddy at the idea that it will be “criticized from all sides”. That’s a good thing Andrea?

While I agree with them on Afghanistan and that the President did not promise to get us out of there, President Obama did promise some real reform on health care and he also talked about cleaning the lobbyists and their influence out of Washington. This is hardly what’s going on now with Max Baucus and his lobbyists writing the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee.

And Clarence Page conflates going between single-payer and the public option to the compromises being talked about now. Note to Clarence Page. Going from the public option to a trigger—or no public option at all—is not the same as hedging between single payer and the public option. One is an already bad compromise that might lead to reform. The other is just loading up the pockets of the insurance industry by forcing everyone into the system with no price controls.

Transcript below the fold.

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John Amato has blogged about this and this clip from this week's The Chris Matthews Show is proof positive that the progressive blogosphere must be smart about picking battles in pushing a liberal agenda for America. Let's face it, you and I and the rest of the liberal blogosphere have been right more often than not and certainly exponentially over the Villagers that populate The Chris Matthews Show. But they're not ready to give up their coveted place at the table, and certainly not to upstart bloggers who don't have the decency to take them at their word any longer.

So to those oh-so-wise Beltway bobbleheads, we will be the "angry left" that Obama must marginalize in order to have a successful presidency. It won't be the Republicans with their bag of obstructionist tricks, ones of which WaPo's Ceci Connolly doesn't even have memory, that give Obama a hard time, it will be us, the "angry left." We are the ones to not give Obama a "honeymoon period" and we will be the ones fighting him as he attempts to execute his agenda.

Sigh. Do anyone of these chuckleheads ever consider that the reason the left has been so "angry" for the last eight plus years is that what we've said and what we've valued has been criticized, dismissed, sneered, condemned, denounced and our characters attacked? Of course not. And when the nation shows that they have awakened to what we've been saying all along and announced with their vote that they want to give the left a shot, we're still criticized, dismissed, sneered, condemned, denounced and our characters attacked because we might like to see some people actually reflective of our values in office.

Good to see the open minds of the Very Serious Villagers remain. Would that they would be so condemning of those who have been so very wrong all this time.

Transcripts (courtesy of Heather) below the fold

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By David Ignatius of the Washington Post.

The mixing of anti-terrorism policy with the 2004 presidential campaign is becoming destructive. It is creating a vicious cycle of hype, skepticism and mistrust that puts the country's security at risk.

The dangers of politicizing terrorism were clear in this month's announcement about potential attacks on financial centers in the New York area and in Washington. When Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge disclosed the threats on Aug. 1, he faced immediate skepticism about whether the intelligence was valid. Sadly, the Bush administration had helped create this climate of public suspicion by overusing its elaborate, color-coded system of terrorism warnings. After a terrorism advisory by Attorney General John Ashcroft last spring was pooh-poohed the same day by Ridge, some people wondered whether these warnings were being used for political effect. In the administration's eagerness to demonstrate the seriousness of the threat against financial centers, something terrible happened. An official in Washington or Pakistan, it's not clear which, leaked the name of the captured al Qaeda operative who was a main source of the information -- a 25-year-old Pakistani named Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan. His name was leaked to the New York Times on Aug. 1, the same day the terror warning was issued, in a seeming attempt to bolster the credibility of the intelligence report.

Whatever the reason for the leak, it was disastrous for intelligence operations.