Gen. William ‘Our Strategic Enemy is Satan’ Boykin gets bounced at the Pentagon.

We’re sitting here listening to an interview with Sen. McCain. And he’s just made the argument that if the message of the 2006 election were really to wind up our involvement in Iraq, then Joe Lieberman wouldn’t have been reelected in Connecticut. Now, I know Lieberman’s a pretty touchy topic. But even in the most generous interpretation, didn’t Lieberman run his whole general election campaign asking Connecticut voters to look beyond his position on Iraq which most of them disagreed with?

Late Update: As a number of readers have noted, in the general election, Sen. Lieberman was actually talking about ending the war in Iraq, just not in perhaps as precipitous a way as he claimed Ned Lamont would do. He certainly wasn’t talking about an open-ended commitment or an escalation. Here’s one of Joe’s ad for an example.

So where do they stand? As Greg points out here, there are reportedly at least ten Republican senators who will vote against the president’s surge plan in the non-binding senate resolution the Dems plan to bring to the floor. Who are they? And how many Republican senators up for reelection in 2008 are going to vote for the ‘surge’?

If you’ve seen specific senators quoted on this, let us know. Or give your senator a ring. We’ll keep a list.

Here’s the video of John McCain wishfully reading the tea leaves of Joe Lieberman’s reelection.

And yes, the exit polls show he’s dead wrong.

No need to wait till 9 PM…

Here are early excerpts from President Bush’s speech tonight. Our favorite: “Victory [in Iraq] will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.”

President Bush has seen the Saddam execution video (not clear which one) and said today that it ranks just behind Abu Ghraib as the most damaging mistakes the U.S. has made in Iraq, reports NBC’s Brian Williams:

Upon exiting the West Wing, I phoned one particular detail into MSNBC: Toward the end I asked the President if he’d seen the Saddam Hussein execution video. He said he had, and when I asked where it “ranked” (among the mistakes of the war) he indicated it was just below Abu Ghraib in terms of damage — meaning slightly less damaging. The President also noted the damage done at Haditha.

The President’s comments came in a not-for-quotation background briefing with select reporters in advance of tonight’s primetime address on Iraq.

Larry Johnson: Enough of the Terrorism Canard.

Sen. Mikulski (D-MD): “This is a reckless plan – it is about saving the Bush presidency, not about saving Iraq.”

I think William Arkin hits on the one genuine piece of news in the president’s speech: the direct threats of military force against Syria and Iran. I guess that counts as escalation too.

Fineman: “George W. Bush spoke with all the confidence of a perp in a police lineup. I first interviewed the guy in 1987 and began covering his political rise in 1993, and I have never seen him, in public or private, look less convincing, less sure of himself, less cocky. With his knitted brow and stricken features, he looked, well, scared. Not surprising since what he was doing in the White House library was announcing the escalation of an unpopular war.”