Who's in charge here?

It almost as if the Iraqi government was in charge. What's happened to Mr. Swagger? or, the "the cowardly loser" as Digby calls him. It seems that, with BushCo, it's always about politics.

I know it's very exciting and enjoyable for the media to incessantly masturbate each other on camera while chattering about whether a candidate who's not even on the ballot should apologise for some trivial bullshit, but this story getting no play in the days before an election is downright journalistic malfeasance:

Exploiting GOP vulnerability in the Nov. 7 elections, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki flexed his political muscle Tuesday and won U.S. agreement to lift military blockades on Sadr City and another Shiite enclave where an American soldier was abducted.

U.S. forces, who had set up the checkpoints in Baghdad last week as part of an unsuccessful search for the soldier, drove away in Humvees and armored personnel carriers at the 5 p.m. deadline set by al-Maliki. Iraqi troops, who had manned the checkpoints with the Americans, loaded coils of razor wire and red traffic cones onto pickup trucks.

The withdrawal was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite enclave where the Americans have focused their manhunt and where anti-American sentiment runs high. The initial American reaction to the order, which was released by Mr. Maliki’s press office, strongly suggested that the statement had not been issued in concert with the American authorities.

“Our commanders have his press release and are reviewing how best to address these concerns,” Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said early Tuesday afternoon, about an hour after the order was issued.

Late Tuesday night, after hours of silence, a senior American Embassy official who had been delegated to return reporters’ phone calls said the prime minister’s order was “the result of a meeting” between Mr. Maliki, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq. “It was essentially something that Maliki wanted to do and Casey agreed to it,” the official said.

[...]

Al-Maliki's move Tuesday came three days after his closest aide, Hassan al-Suneid, said unabashedly that the prime minister was trying to capitalize on American voter discontent with the war and White House reluctance to open a public fight with the Iraqi leader just before the midterm election. Much of the discontent is fueled by soaring death tolls among U.S. troops and their inability to contain raging sectarian violence 3 1/2 years after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

How very convenient for the administration that the press is concentrating on irrelevancies when a story like this breaks, eh?

The Maliki government is playing Bush for the cowardly loser he is, apparently threatening him with more bad headlines, so the Americans backed off and left a soldier behind.

But look no further, citizens. John Kerry blew a punchline and that requires a full-on media frenzy. Nothing is more fun and exciting to the kewl kidz than going after a simple meaningless anti-Democrat story that pleases the GOP establishment. Everybody wins. Except the American people, of course. Or that abandoned soldier in Iraq.

I would love to see the Democrats blow this up. It's the hardest of hardball, but I am finding it difficult to think of a good reason why these people should be immune from the kind of treatment they dished out to Clinton over Somalia and would dish out again no matter who we were fighting. I realize that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy, but this is beyond anything we've seen. The Bush administration is so weak and so useless that they are allowing Maliki and the Sadr militia to dictate terms to the US military because of the US elections.

Try to imagine what would happen in a Democrat did such a thing.