Obama's Okey-Doke #2: Iraq

"You all know the okey-doke," Obama told voters in Mississippi, "when someone's trying to bamboozle you, when they're trying to hoodwink you."

Apparently, the President's team has learned a goodly amount about the use of the okey-doke. As noted below by Bracey, the White House used some of the old Spellings okey-doke to push the Business Roundtable's agenda of creating 20 college graduates for every available job as a way to grow our own domestic version of exploited workers.

Did anyone notice that, just a couple of hours before yesterday's speech, the White House offered to add 3-6 months to the Iraq withdrawal timetable and to leave up to 55,000 GIs there after "bringing our troops home."

From the NYTimes:

. . . .In recent weeks, Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, discussed the three withdrawal options — 16, 19 and 23 months — with the president. Pentagon officials characterized the talks as extensive and said that each option was presented with what Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen saw as the accompanying risks.

Both Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen made their own recommendations to the president about what they saw as the best option, but Pentagon officials declined to specify them. One senior defense official did say that Mr. Gates “has historically always been extremely deferential to his commanders in the field.”

The top two commanders responsible for Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno, have declined to say what options they preferred, but military officials have made it clear that the two were uncomfortable with the 16-month plan that Mr. Obama backed during the campaign.

Pentagon officials said Tuesday that they did not know what the size of the residual force in Iraq might be, although one of Mr. Obama’s national security advisers said during the campaign that it could number 30,000 to 55,000 troops. . . .

This is much more sophisticated than the Bush team, which dumped bad news on Friday afternoons. Much more.