If it needed clarifying at this late date, this week's Democratic presidential debate underscored the fact that none of the party's frontrunners supports a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq any time soon. And with Bill Richardson out of the race and Dennis Kucinich excluded from recent debates, voters aren't even likely to hear an advocate for genuine withdrawal from the Democratic camp.

The key phrase here is "combat troops." Clinton, Obama and Edwards are all in favor of withdrawing combat troops, but they support other military missions, from training Iraqi forces to serving as a "quick strike force" to go after Al Qaeda operatives to protecting the borders from infiltration by insurgents and jihadists. It is hard to see how these missions could be carried out without an ongoing commitment of tens of thousands of troops -- a reduction and redeployment, not a "withdrawal."

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In a piece that ran over the week-end, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt comes to the defense of the paper's decision to hire neo-con extraordinaire Bill Kristol as its new op-ed columnist. While hardly a ringing endorsement, the piece does mischaracterize the nature of the opposition to the Kristol appointment. The large type pull quote/summary of the piece is "a mob gathers around William Kristol and his pen."

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