Mike Pintek, This Evening.

I caught a few minutes of Mike Pintek this evening. He was chatting with Congressman Jason Altmire on John McIntire's old show.

They spent most of the time talking about the Congressman's recent trip to the Middle East - which is where Pintek made some mistakes.

Bad Pintek, bad bad Pintek.

He said a few stupid things (they really need to update the talking points over there - I mean he's still plagiarizing Bill O'Reilly on Billo's dailykos rant - something about how the dailykos is the KKK of the left.

But the big mistake he made (and I am sorry to say Congressman Altmire followed suit) was in calling it "General Patraeus' report" when we've actually known since the middle of last week, that the report will actually be written by the White House. Hidden at the tail end of an article from the LA Times (7th paragraph from the end, no less) we find this:

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government.

In fact a majority of the American people, according to a poll done by CNN, already don't trust the report:

A majority of Americans don't trust the upcoming report by the Army's top commander in Iraq on the progress of the war and even if they did, it wouldn't change their mind, according to a new poll.

This report came a day after the LA Times article - note CNN's use of "report by the Army's top commander..."

He also continued the myth that O'Hanlon and Pollack were critics of the Bush administration while failing to point out the many times they were wrong about the war.

Mikey even pointed to this statement from Senators Levin and Warner, to show that the surge is working. Pintek seemed to be focussed on the first part of this sentence, while ignoring the second:

While we believe that the "surge" is having measurable results, and has provided a degree of "breathing space" for Iraqi politicians to make the political compromises which are essential for a political solution in Iraq, we are not optimistic about the prospects for those compromises. [emphasis added]

They failed completely, of course, to even mention this column from Sunday's NYTimes:

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. [emphasis added]

And so on.

All-in-all your typical Pintek spin. It's not even very interesting.