Yesterday the candidates fought before the cameras to show who has the best Austin Powers war Mojo baby (growwwwllllll, smile). War Credibility. Who’s got it, who needs it, who wants it? Who cares? We’re about to replace a draft-dodging ‘pretender’-in-chief who led us into war on false pretences and will do/say anything to show it wasn’t a mistake to invade Iraq when the 9-11 perpetrators were in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, with a choice this fall between a ‘fossilised war president’ in McCain or a Senator who for more than a year has insisted the real war is against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Right now, no matter what Senator Obama says, McCain=Bush will jump all over him. As one commentator said yesterday, “even if he went to Iraq, listened to the generals and decided to stay the course, the McCain=Bush machine would attack his rationale.

Yesterday the McCain=Bush machine coincidentally chose the day Barack Obama made clear his plan for cleaning up six-years of ‘war that never ends’ to have both a major presidential foreign policy speech suggesting he will begin to withdraw troops (now that we are no longer welcome in Iraq) and McCain-Bush went on a coordinated attack against Barack Obama saying, “how can he know what to do in Iraq if he hasn’t been there in a year and never set foot in Afghanistan?”

Suddenly Henry Kissinger-like frequent flyer mile diplomacy means they know what to do as McCain=Bush suggested that 7 years and 7 months into his Administration he continues to “make progress” and McCain is the only one who can lead there.

Bush is desperate to bring peace to the Middle East, rattle Iran and magically produce the body of Bin Laden before the end of the year thinking history will forget the previous seven and ignore the ‘mental’ recession the world is in over oil and bad mortgages. Grabbing a page from Phil Gramm’s playbook he suggested we’re just having a “few difficulties” and the near meltdown of the mortgage system yesterday is done with and nothing more can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong…

The pitifully sheepish Democratic leadership is now resorting to “Hail Mary” length of the field football passes to try and dislodge Bush=McCain team. Representative Kucinich bangs the Bush/Cheney impeachment drum slowly and we’re beginning to listen. Also a Democratic Congressman made overtures this week to several Iraqi members of parliament to try and stop an agreement being reached between President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki which would be unilateral and binding, yet made without consulting either Congress or their parliament.

Now if the media could come back from their summer vacation in France and pay attention to something other than the Brangelina twins (babies born to stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie whose 1st photos will be worth an insane $11 million dollars to charity) and for whom the press scrum is so thick traffic is often stopped, the game will be engaged.

It is summer, not many are paying attention and the game doesn’t really begin until Labour Day in the states (1st Monday in September). Then as in 1960 when Richard Nixon tried to paint John Kennedy as inexperienced, the convention and 1st debates will show viewers for the 1st time that the smear machine tactics are unfounded and their fears will shift. Yeah, this Obama guy’s OK, he can handle it.

Obama though needs to keep playing tough offence between then and now. By then McCain’s Straight Talk Express will have spun itself into a pretzel and the debate will shift from the trivial to the real pain Americans feel, despite the record sales number of flat screen telly’s on maxed out credit cards…

Below, under the Reflections tab is the full text of Senator Obama’s New York Times Op-ed piece that started the furore.

Precisely because it is so well thought out, it scares the Republican smear machine that we might pay attention to the mission bungled vs. the one they want to thin is now accomplished.