Okay, the vampire-impregnated lady isn’t the only Froot Loop in the box. Apparently the talk-radio “full mooners” (as James Wolcott calls them) are back from their triumphant tour of Iraq and declaring victory is at hand. Wolcott says:

The Sunday pages of The New York Times must have brought Michael Graham only further confirmation that what he heard over there is the plain truth and what he reads over here is fancy hogwash. Denying the enveloping disaster in Iraq is how he maintains his membership in the marching band of useful idiots.

He then refers the morons our heroic microphone phondlers to this, this, and this.

I’m going to type this very slowly and simply so that the Couch Potato Pattons can understand what I’m saying, even though I don’t expect them to accept it.

What’s rising in Iraq is the spectre of American defeat and Iraqi chaos. We’re are past the point when you could counter every article of which you disapprove by summoning Austin Bay from the bullpen for a positive spin, or seeking shelter in Winston Churchill’s lion shadow, or being warned over and over that “failure is not an option” (yes, it is). We are past the point of listening to Joe Biden and others say we need more troops on the ground and more international cooperation. Neither cavalry is riding over the hill.

Where the warbloggers are actively denying the spectre of defeat, the political talkshows are passively denying it. Today–Sunday–it was all about the Supreme Court nominee and the Plame leak and not much else. Understandable. But at what point will attention be paid to the full enormity of what’s unraveling in Iraq? Or will it be like global warming, which Russert, Stephanopolous, Chris Wallace, and the rest ignore altogether, as if waiting for heatstroke deaths to dot the capital lawns before acknowledging something momentous is happening. They’re still waiting for the memo that’ll verify what any fool can see.