Morning Post

Good Morning. The weather is sunny. The world not so much.

• The Prez hires a guy with some real experience at handling supeanas and such:

Mr. Fielding was deputy counsel to President Richard M. Nixon under John W. Dean III and was White House counsel for the first five years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

• Guess the ‘lection didn’t wake nobody up on the editorial desks at the nation’s newspapers.
Guess we can expect lots of “why is congress being so mean to the President?” edits and, then, 20 years from now we can argue about why the Dems shut the war down just when we were on the brink of winning. Oh, wait, we’re doing that now. Thanks Major Media poo-bahs!

• More on the brilliant planning for an escalation from WaPo:

In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, six in 10 respondents said the war is not worth fighting, three-quarters disapproved of how Bush has handled the situation, and there was no consensus about how the United States should adjust its policies in Iraq. Only 17 percent called for an increase in U.S. forces, the “surge” believed to be a centerpiece of the new Bush plan.

Later in the story, we find that the reason we’re sending in 20,000 troops is to help take Sadr City.

The United States hopes to avoid conducting large-scale operations that take it into Sadr City — the capital’s sprawling Shiite slum, with about 2 million people who overwhelmingly support Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr. “Iraqis will take on this plan and lead it. We will be there to support them and be there to help them hold it,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on the plan.

But in practice, U.S. forces have often ended up in the forefront of joint combat operations.

Starting another war within a war—what a perfectly awful reason to send people to their deaths.