McCAIN REDUX: "WOULD I HAD SEEN A WHITE BEAR!"

I just love it when strict contructionists let their original intent get all loosey goosey.

John McCain, deriding Obama and the defeatocrats for their failure to note the successes of the surge, listed among the accomplishments the fact that troop strength in Iraq had been drawn down to pre-surge levels.

Of course, no such thing had as yet happened, as any number of reporters and politicos pointed out.

Whereupon they were promptly denounced by the McCain camp for nitpicking verb tenses.

Now I'm in favor of doing all sorts of things with and to verb tenses, but this caught my attention; suddenly the McCain campaign was sounding like Gertrude Stein --

For of course, it was explained, by that great postmodernist John McCain himself, that what he had said had been true because troop strength "will have been drawn down to presurge levels."

In other words, what McCain explained he had all along meant was simply that when the day arrives that troop levels in Iraq have been drawn down to presurge levels, it will become true that troop strength has been drawn down to presurge levels.

Hard to argue with that logic.

Would that I had seen troop levels drawn down to presurge levels, for how shall I describe it --