THE Report

We all know that the September Petraeus report White House report on progress of the Iraq escalation is due next month. If you read this blog, you also know that it was revealed that the report is being written by the White House. But it gets better all the time:

WaPo via Needlenose:

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.

. . . With the report due by Sept. 15, officials at the White House, in Congress and in Baghdad said that no decisions have been made on where, when or how Petraeus and Crocker will appear before Congress. Lawmakers from both parties are growing worried that the report -- far from clarifying the United States' future in Iraq -- will only harden the political battle lines around the war.

. . . Those positions only hardened yesterday with reports that the document would not be written by the Army general but instead would come from the White House, with input from Petraeus, Crocker and other administration officials.

Oh, I get it. This is hereby becoming the disappearing report. The White House will scrub it clean, but they can't scrub it clean enough for a public hearing. So by trying to make it below the radar, we can all just pretend that the Pentagon's daily propaganda assessments of things going well are the facts, and that the war just continues.

I suspect that some "moderate" conservative Democrats are signaling that they'll be OK with another Friedman Unit otherwise the White House wouldn't even try this.
Ball's (or lack thereof) in your courts now Nancy and Harry.