"I Meant to be Naked!"

Earlier this month, I wrote:

There were four plausible ways that "The Emperor's New Clothes" might end:

...(4) The emperor might admit that he was naked but deny that he had been tricked; indeed, he had always planned on walking around naked in front of his subjects, and his decision to do so had excellent results!

I rest my case.

The problem here, of course, is that while, in broad strokes this drawdown plan is the President's plan, what the Senate (and mostly, the Democrats) have forced Bush to do is to actually begin to determine and provide dates and numbers. That is, the president is beginning to say, we expect to have benchmark (a) done by date (b), which will allow us to withdraw of redeploy (c) troops.

Whatever Dubya tries to tell, there is a tremendous difference between saying "when they stand up we will stand down" and actually providing metrics and timetables for the Iraqis "standing up."

On the other hand, what I read of the Biden plan sounds only marginally more detailed than the President's soundbites; of course, the actual plan might be more much more detail and metric-oriented than the Yahoo! summary.

In any case, even the Yahoo! summary of the Biden plan has more actual details than Dubya has ever presented us with. So at least we are getting somewhere.

That is all.