I used to be a bigger fan of Thomas Sowell, and his latest opinion piece draws me no closer. In making his case that McCain lied about Romney's statements about troop withdrawals, Sowell wrote this :

During Mitt Romney’s ABC News interview that Senator McCain twisted, Governor Romney was asked by the interviewer whether he agreed with President Bush’s veto of congressional legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal, and whether Romney as President would veto similar legislation.

"Of course," was Romney’s reply. There was no ambiguity.

But that only tells part of the story. It is true that Romney did not want Congress to dictate troop withdrawal timetables to Bush (that's a no-brainer for any GOP candidate except for maybe Ron Paul), but Romney was agreeable that the president and al-Maliki "have to have a series of timetables and milestones that they speak about," so long as they're not made public. As I wrote here , that statement is vague enough to be interpreted that Romney was amenable to secret timetables for withdrawal, subject to unspecified "milestones" (we don't know if he was talking good milestones or bad ones). Implicit in his comments was that we were losing this endeavor, or at least that's how I read it. If we didn't want to signal our troop movements to the enemy, then there must be an undefeated enemy out there to signal. Or look at it another way. If we were prevailing, then why keep scheduled withdrawals under wraps? After all, if the enemy is sufficiently vanquished and if adequate numbers of Iraqi troops are sufficiently trained to maintain this improved situation, what is the harm in announcing troop drawdowns?

As Robert Kagan observed , during the darkest hours of the war, Romney went wobbly on the surge strategy, choosing to straddle rather than dig in. McCain indeed went too far when he said that Romney wanted to set a date for withdrawal. Romney never explicitly said that, so McCain is guilty of a mindreading penalty at the very least, which is a dishonest and intellectually lazy practice. The Arizona Senator would have been on more solid ground saying that Romney wavered when things looked bleakest, then became more enthusiastic about the surge strategy when it was proving to be successful. But that said, Romney needs to answer some questions himself.

While many are critical of McCain's stubbornness, the same criticality can be applied to Romney's well-documented history of changing political positions when the situation suits him. This has been my main problem with Romney, and he didn't help himself when he pandered to Michigan voters, talking about fair trade and a starting a federal industrial policy. But hey, if he's nominated, I will support him, but I won't be quiet if he "adjusts" his positions on important issues. I also won't be quiet when McCain screws up, as you will see in my next blog entry.

I won't address the rest of Sowell's points because he sullied his own credibility right out of the starting gate.