The clip’s self-explanatory but Ace will walk you through it in case you’re as slow as, say, Joe Biden. In a nutshell, he wants you to know that he never doubted that the surge would quiet things down; what he doesn’t want you to know is that he swore up and down on the Senate floor that it would never achieve something politically useful. Funny how success in Iraq is the one thing the White House apparently didn’t inherit from Bush, huh?

If you’re keeping score at home, the supposed foreign-policy genius whom we call our VP has the following track record on Iraq: Voted against the Gulf War; voted in favor of the 2003 invasion; opposed the surge; called for the country to be partitioned and earned himself a healthy degree of infamy among Iraqis in the process; and has now taken to lying about his prior naysaying and insisting that the administration deserves more credit than it does. Point for point, it’s the precise opposite of conventional wisdom about how things have played out. To steal a line from Glenn Reynolds, they told me that if I voted for McCain we’d have a vice president who didn’t know anything about foreign affairs — and they were right!