Caving is not consensus

By Fester:

Senator Droopy and friends came out with a Washington Post-Op-Ed calling for a consensus policy on Iraq.  Their prescribed policy is, as Steve Benen notes, the same policy that McCain ran on and got crushed on.  The prescribed policy is to fetishize the Surge, never question the logic, seek tactical results at the blindness of operational or strategic impacts, ignorance of reality (prevent Iranian hegemony and influence --- the guys in charge that they praise in the previous and proceeding paragraphs are heads of parties whose membership receive numerous Iranian government pensions!) and disregards both domestic political realities, fiscal realities, and pre-existing agreements.  But beyond that, it is not a bad plan....

There is already a consensus plan across American and Iraqi public opinion, Iraqi and American elite opinion, joint agreements and both governments' intents --- get almost all American troops out of the country in sixteen to thirty six months. 

So in this definitional black-hole, consensus means a near supermajority caving in to an isolated trio of cranks.

This is not surprising, as I noted in November that this will be Senator Lieberman's M.O. for the remainder of his term in office:

So what should we expect to see from Senator Lieberman?

He will attempt to bear hug Senator McCain's primary political asset --- the ability to create in his own persona the only 'reasonable' and 'bi-partisan' contract zone that he can dominate.  He will seek to become the leader of any Gang of "X" where X is a small number of Republicans who are not crazy and conservative Red state Democrats.  He will seek to become the political-media complexes' reasonableness threshold.  'If he agrees, it is okay; if he disagrees, it is too radical...'

I think this will work initially well for Lieberman as he will be enabled by the GOP as he is their best wedge into the Democratic caucus (I wonder how much information he'll leak to McConnell on legislative strategy) and he has national press covering fire.  And besides, he pisses the right people off, including the dirty fucking hippies who have gotten oh so worked up about Iraq,

No suprise at how predictable this was to us plebes....