I came in for the post title. I stayed for the content.

From DailyKos's mouth to many a reporter's ears (we hope):

The first stanza of this nonsense poem looks like this:

"It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing," Bush said. "All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq."

If idiocy had gravity, that paragraph would collapse into a black hole. Let's take it sentence by sentence:

"It makes no sense to tell the enemy when you plan to start withdrawing." Here's a news flash -- there is no such thing as surprise withdrawal. You can't sneak 160,000 soldiers out of Iraq in the trunk of a Volvo. One day, America will leave Iraq, and when we do, we will catch no one - no one -- by surprise. Does anyone really think al Qaeda will be looking at empty blockhouses for weeks saying to themselves, "why don't those infidels come out to play?" When we start to leave, it will be broadcast on every station around the world for months in advance and there is not one damn thing anyone can do about that. Whenever any Republican advances the "we can't let them know when we're leaving line," they should follow it with an agonized scream, because stupidity that powerful ought to hurt.

"All the terrorists would have to do is mark their calendars and gather their strength and begin plotting how to overthrow the government and take control of the country of Iraq." So, knowing when we're going to depart, the terrorists would... settle down and plot while we went on about our business? Has no one noticed that this is exactly what we wanted to happen? If giving a timeline would make the terrorists sit down and check off the days like Ralphie waiting for his Red Ryder, then why not give a deadline on day one? Heck, make it an announcement "Hey, bad guys, we're going to leave in a year. In the meantime, why don't you park it some place while the government gets its act together, we repair a few power plants, get the water running, and get people used to peace."

The president is daily delivering a message that directly translates to "We plan on sneaking all our troops out of town, because otherwise they'd wait for us to leave before shooting," and no one is calling him on it. Hell, nine out of ten little tin soldiers stood up at the Republican debate to repeat this message almost word for word.

What's stanza #2 of the national nonsense?

"Al Qaeda terrorists who behead captives and order suicide bombings in Iraq would not simply be satisfied to see us gone. A retreat in Iraq would mean that they would likely follow us here."

I was only sixteen when I worked for my local weekly paper, but there were these things they taught us to ask back then -- questions they called them. Who. What. When. Maybe even why and how. Has anyone out there thought of applying these things to the tune that dutifully plays every time someone winds up the crank on Bush or McCain? Who will follow us home? How will they do that? What the holy hell have you been sniffing? The insurgents in Iraq are Iraqis, they already are home. That handful of people in Iraq who really are al Qaeda, and not just people who have adopted that name because they know it pisses us off, can not hike to America. If terrorists can really hop a jet and land in America, it's because this administration is fixated on Iraq and had done next to nothing about real problems of national security. In fact, this whole second paragraph translates as "We've done nothing to stop terrorists from coming here."