McCain's op-ededness

The gasosphere is outraged -- outraged, I tells ya -- that the Times has rejected a McCain op-ed because it was, well, pretty well substance free, though it was full o' ponies.

McCain's piece, which Drudge reprinted in full, attacked Obama's position on troop withdrawals from Iraq and lauded the success of the "surge." In the piece, McCain also stated that he expects "to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of [his] first term in office, in 2013."

In rejecting McCain's submission, New York Times Op-Ed editor David Shipley said that he wasn't "going to be able to accept this piece as currently written," and explained his rationale by saying: "The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans ... It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq."

Right on cue, right-wing bloggers have reacted to Shipley's decision with outrage and allegations of liberal media bias. Little Green Footballs fumed that the Times refused McCain's article while running pieces by Yasser Arafat and members of Hamas in the past. The blog Gateway Pundit asked, sarcastically, "Media bias ... What media bias?" and, in citing the full text of McCain's article, continued, "Here's the editorial that The New York Times refused to publish. It is fantastic. It is a brilliant piece of writing that absolutely destroys Obama's phony attempts this week to look like a Commander in Chief ... Barack Obama is a war loser, plain and simple."

Shocking. New York Times readers are being deprived of this level of insight.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Well, damn. But does the McCain campaign really want to get into an op-ed war? I mean, it could be pretty embarrassing if we start to go down Memory Lane.

The force our military uses will be less than proportional to the threat of injury we can expect to face should Saddam Hussein continue to build an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons.

How'd that work out?