In attempting to defend his lies about Sen. Obama, Illinois Review whiner George Dienhart continues to parse the finest of lines and blatantly make up baloney. He complains that my earlier post pointing out the facts behind his fibs claiming Sen. Obama has somehow “flipped” his Iraq position missed his intended point and that I should get reading lessons. It seems he needs to look in the mirror.

Readers should know Mr. Deinhart is so enamored with me he once called my office just to check on my whereabouts. I suppose he probably made the trip from beautiful Bull Valley one day and knows all about my ugly green kitchen countertops (a la conservative stalker extraordinaire Michelle Malkin) and he probably even looked up my DMV records and knows all about that junky old green Mazda Protege I got rid of years ago (my first new car, ah memories).

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First, the Dienhart parsing…

Here’s what he originally wrote:

[...] The latest flip was on the war. It seems that Obama will not pull the troops out . Liberals can now collectively whine about how this isn’t a flip. All done now? Here is the quote from Sen. Obama.

“I have put forward a plan that will get our troops out by the end of 2009. We already saw today reports that the Iraqi minister suggests that we’re going to be in there at least until 2018, a decade-long commitment. Currently, we are spending $9 to $10 billion a month. The notion is that we are going to sustain that at the same time as we’re neglecting what we see happening in Afghanistan right now, where you have a luxury hotel in Kabul blown up by militants and the situation continues to worsen.”

Notice that first sentence? “I have put forward a plan that will get our troops out by the end of 2009.” What did Sen. Obama say in his recent Op/Ed piece in the New York Times? “’We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces.”

I’ll leave the bizarre, yet historically correct reference to Mesopotamia alone for the moment. Let’s call this what it is- a flip. Oh, and lets just be honest about what he is proposing- the same “residual force” that John McCain was crucified on earlier in the campaign. [...]

(emphasis added for clarity)

Now, my post called Dienhart out on the “Notice that first sentence” bit… not the “Oh, and” bit which took up a much smaller portion of his post.

Again, there is no “flip” here.

Obama’s Plan for Iraq is the same 16 month strategy he first proposed as binding legisltion in the Senate in January 2007.

• January 2007 (when it was first introduced) + Obama’s 16 Month Strategic Redeployment = March 2008
• January 2008 (when Obama again mentioned it in a Dem debate) + Obama’s 16 Month Strategic Redeployment = March 2009
• January 2009 (when the next president is sworn in) + Obama’s 16 Month Strategic Redeployment (should it be Obama who is elected) = March 2010

…In other words, the Obama Plan for Iraq is exactly the same. The only thing changing is the timing and the obstructionist Republicans — from the filibustering Senate GOP to the veto-ready Republican president — are the ones causing the delays in implementation.

Heck, even the Iraqi leadership is now essentially agreeing with Obama on the concept of a strategic timetable.

But, Dienhart’s second post goes on and on about how he wasn’t really talking about the timing (despite what he wrote about 2009 vs 2010). No, instead he now says he was really emphasizing the last few sentences so ignore all the other stuff. To wit, he now writes:

“Ahh, that’s not what the piece was addressed. Quite clearly, I stated that the flip occurred when Obama went from advocating a total pullout from Iraq to leaving behind sixty thousand troops as a “reaction force”.”

As I demonstrated above, Mr. Dienhart wrote about the 2009 vs 2010 timing for the majority of that first diatribe and didn’t really get into discussing the point about residual forces until after he says “Oh, and…”

Bizarre, but it leads to…

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Second, the Dienhart baloney…

Mr. Dienhart originally wrote, “It seems that Obama will not pull the troops out” and “Oh, and lets just be honest about what he is proposing- the same “residual force” that John McCain was crucified on earlier in the campaign.” (Again, emphasis added.)

This too is not a flip, despite Mr. Dienhart’s deepest partisan wishes.

You see, from the get-go Sen. Obama has said the same thing about having a limited number of troops in country after the strategic redeployment of the combat brigades. Surely Mr. Dienhart, as a military man himself, knows the difference in forces. Obama has never said he would pull out every single GI (our embassies are guarded by Marines after all, would Mr. Dienhart complain about that too?) but that we do need to focus on redeploying the bulk of our battle forces, a point on which the majority of Americans agree with him.

Recall that Sen. Obama first introduced his plan to the Senate in January of 2007. From his Senate website, dated January 30, 2007:

“The plan allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain as basic force protection, to engage in counter-terrorism, and to continue the training of Iraqi security forces. If the Iraqis are successful in meeting the thirteen benchmarks for progress laid out by the Bush Administration, this plan also allows for the temporary suspension of the redeployment, provided Congress agrees that the benchmarks have been met and that the suspension is in the national security interest of the United States.”

In other words, there is no “flip” and Dienhart flops again.

Perhaps it is Mr. Dienhart who needs that reading lesson. Or, perhaps he’d like that thinking lesson instead since both his first and second post merely mimic the bogus and hollow yelps of “Flip!” from other partisan conservatives.

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And some miscellany…

By the by, Dienhart complains that the trackback on the original posts appeared twice. Horrors.

I hadn’t realized the trackback popped up twice on the original Dienhart screed. I’m not sure why that would’ve happened other than I was thinking about posting an update about other cons writing about non-flips so I stopped in on that post’s edit feature later in the day (I ended up not doing the update). I suppose those darn Internets may have taken that as a double-post.

If I could fix the quirk to soothe Mr. Dienhart’s poor feelings I would but really it’s nothing he should worry his pretty little head about though.

As for why I write about Illinois Review contributors… they keep posting malarkey and rational folks like me will keep debunking it. If the Reviewers don’t like that, it’s well within their means to stop writing their spurious essays and start writing honestly. (It’s funny how the non-Ill Review peeps I debunk have the same complaints, as if I’m hurting their egos instead of pointing out facts. Go figure.)

I get that Mr. Dienhart apparently loathes what Sen. Obama has proposed and all the values for which he stands. But does he really need to continue to make up such claptrap? Apparently doing so, just like calling random people just to check in on them, fulfills some sort of desire for him.

To each their own.

PS: Mr. Dienhart may consider the 63% of Americans who say the Iraq War was not worth it as “anti-war” (ABC News Poll, 7/10-13, 2008). But, really, most of us rational Americans are simply anti-lying our way into war and, more importantly, anti-bungled war. Same goes for Democrats or Republicans who worm their way into needless wars — they both tend to get clobbered at the ballot box.