Willing to go to bat for Eliot Engel?

I posted about Rep. Eliot Engel's disgraceful and fallacious attempt to undermine Gen. David Petraeus' trustworthiness earlier. "Duane" popped by to offer something like a defense of Engel's comments. Turns out that a blogger went to bat for Engel right about the time I was blasting him.

Petraeus thanked Engel for the opportunity to defend the piece, because "I stand by it." He noted that it contained several notes of caution, in which he said there were still many challenges ahead in Iraq. (That's true, but any honest reading of the whole piece will indicate it communicates a sense of positive momentum that cannot be easily reconciled with the past three years of lack of progress toward the U.S. handoff to Iraqi troops.)
(Minnesota Monitor)

Ah, if only I had high-paying advertiser for every time I'd seen the "any honest reading" ploy ...

Eric Black wrote the entry, and I'll address my reply to him.

Eric, there's absolutely nothing difficult about reconciling a short-term positive assessment of momentum with a long-term negative observation of momentum, in principle.



The green arrow represents a short-term assessment of progress.
The dark blue bracket represents a long-term trend of negative progress.

The blue bracket can never contradict the assessment given at the green arrow unless said assessment makes predictions about progress that fall into the blue bracketed area. I don't see anything remotely like that. Engel failed to point out anything like that. Black followed Engel's lead.


The line I graphed does not represent an attempt to realistically graph progress in Iraq, just in case there's any doubt on that point.


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