1115.org

After The Petraeus-Crocker Show’s debut on Monday at the joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees, the reviews were uniformly lukewarm. Critics unanimously panned the show as boring. A non-event, they grumbled. Petraeus and Crocker showed up, said exactly what they were expected to say, faced no real questions, so nothing noteworthy happened at all. And somehow all of this managed to take six and a half hours. And the likes of CNN and MSNBC felt obliged for some reason to carry the whole damn thing live, for far longer than it made any sense to.

But Senators are a different breed than House Representatives. So Tuesday’s back-to-back matinée performances before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees packed a lot more punch. Both Republican and Democratic senators skewered Petraeus and Crocker with sharp, incisive questions. Several exchanges were deemed chortle-worthy. A few even led observers to clap their hands in serve-the-bastard-right glee.

Monday’s performance evoked phrases like “a bit of a dud“. Tuesday’s reviews, in contrast, rang with “sharply challenged” and “deep-seated doubt“.

The sad fact is that, at some level, liberals and liberal blogs are celebrating Tuesday’s hearings, and saying to themselves that they went off much better than Monday’s. But all that happened on Tuesday was that some Senators who are disgruntled with the administration’s Iraq policy (or lack thereof) were able to score some debating points, were able to show up Petraeus and Crocker for the loyal administration shills that they have chosen to become. They were able to underline some untruths, and slightly discommode people who long ago lost the ability to feel any real shame.

But nothing meaningful changed on Tuesday at all. George Bush is still going to push the same bankrupt Iraq policy on Thursday that we knew all along he was going to push. Republicans are still going to march in lock-step to his ordained tune. Democrats are still going to make bright-line distinctions between talking-the-talk and walking-the-walk. We are still going to see the same pathetically ludicrous attempts by Democratic congressional leaders to vainly get enough Republican senators to sign on to toothless Iraq war resolutions to make them veto proof. Dozens of American soldiers are still going to get needlessly killed in Iraq every week. Hundreds of Iraqis are still going to get shot in the front of the head or the back of the head every month, and to be counted by Petraeus as a violence statistic or not.

So all that happened on Tuesday was some meaningless entertainment. That’s how thoroughly effed up the whole Iraq situation has become.