Michael Steele now some sort of martyr for anti-war left

As Steele intuited, Obama now reluctantly owns the war in Afghanistan. He has embraced it with all the enthusiasm of a father of the bride at a shotgun wedding. The president is no happy warrior — not much of a warrior at all, to be upfront about it — and so his fellow Democrats have resorted to ugly demagoguery to keep kicking the war back to where it began, the administration of the suddenly cherished Bush. To this end, Brad Woodhouse, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, accused Steele of “betting against our troops and rooting for failure in Afghanistan” — an ugly smear for which my colleague E.J. Dionne Jr. has already administered a well-deserved reprimand…

Steele has since moved on. He had intruded truth into partisan babble — not merely a sin but a truly bad career move. Only one GOP chairman has gone on to the White House and that was George H.W. Bush, a multiplex of a public servant (president, vice president, congressman, CIA director). Times have changed, though; the media crave their fix of quotes from almost anyone, and Steele is glad to oblige. For an entire news cycle he had Afghanistan just right and then, castigated by faded facts, he backed down. A glorious career as a conservative yakker was on the line. He was right on Afghanistan, but he would rather be rich.