Obama has been giving what are, at this point in the debate, unsatisfying and irrelevant statements on Iraq.   And is, of course, being lauded and applauded wildly for them.

In the last debate with Clinton he repeated a neat metaphor he used in earlier debates:

Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out. The question is, who's making the decision initially to drive the bus into the ditch?

Not only is the tortured syntax telling (he uses the past tense to speak of the future, and the present continuous to speak about the distant past) But, while it's a good line, this is resolutely not the question four years on.  Let's get the bus out of the ditch, first, and then we can have the war crimes trial. 

Not only is Obama's statement nonsensical on the face of it, but it contradicts, once again, his own claims for himself as a candidate who is looking forward, not back.  The candidate of the future seems himself to be mired in the past.

Obama had the same empty comeback for McCain a day after the debate:

I have some news for John McCain. There was no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. ...

There is an argument here about judgment that Obama is making, but it is facile, and the fact remains: he doesn’t have any tangible claim to better judgment himself. He wasn’t in the US Senate at the time of the vote. Had he been, from his tough talk now (“…if al Qaeda is forming a base in Iraq, then we will have to act in a way that secures the American homeland and our interests abroad,” &c.), and given his grasp of the strategic importance of Senate votes for both party and personal advancement demonstrated in his record in Illinois, I have a feeling he would have voted alongside Clinton, who was looking ahead to a White House run, too.

Obama has so far made a virtue of his lack of experience in national politics. But talk of dove-like tendencies in the past coupled with hawkish sentiments about “securing the homeland” for the future, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan if necessary, doesn’t sound like too radical a change to me.

But then, you're either on the bus, as the Merry Pranksters used to say, or you're off the bus.  And I guess I missed the Obama Express to Washington.  I'm still sitting in the Ditch with Hillary.