edwin hubble, you poor guy… Not to pile on too hard, but you don’t want to talk about “wash stations”? That concern doesn’t constitute a “serious argument”? I hope you’ve read the follow-up comments and that they’ve sunk in. The problem with being “reality-based” (and why we on this side laugh so hard at that snooty designation) is that for some reason the “reality-based community” tends to ignore actual reality in favor of its putative (and detail-challenged) “basis.”

Optimism is a valuable trait. But it ought to be (a) tempered with realism, and (b) preferably applied toward things that the Reasonable (American, in this case) Person would feel optimistic about (in other words, not a full-scale running retreat, which is what pulling American troops out without an orderly and by-the-book redeployment of materiel would look like). I liked (I think it was) Austin Bay’s comment about how the Democrat template for “withdrawal” is that iconic helicopter-on-the-roof photo: sure, that kind of withdrawal we could do.