At one point a few weeks ago, the President sent his Afghanistan advisers back to the drawing table because he didn't like any of the difficult and imperfect options before him.At that point US/NATO commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal remarked that he could win the war with fewer than one thousand new troops if they were equipped with unicorns and armed with newly developed non-lethal rainbow guns.

"Fantastic!" replied the President. "Let's get on it right away. Now, was that so hard?"

After the disappointment of learning that his commander was being facetious, the President spent several weeks coming to a decision he can live with. After all, the President knows as well as anyone that the situation in Afghanistan calls for robust, decisive action- just as he is also aware that no decision he makes will be perfect and that he will have to live with the consequences of that imperfect decision for the rest of his time in office and, moreover, the rest of his life.

"I am proposing a bold new approach to finish the job in Afghanistan," President Obama told reporters. "I don't know, though. Forty thousand troops sounds like a lot. What do you guys think? Would 35 thousand be better? Do I hear fifty?"

At that point, aides ushered him from the podium and returned him to the Oval Office to further compromise his plans for health insurance reform.

For Republicans, the announcement is a fantastic bit of news. Not only did the President adopt a rather conservative, hawkish approach to the problem of Afghanistan, the decision also tells opposition lawmakers and pundits how they will be complaining about it in the coming months.

"At the end of the day, he's the one who sets the policies for us to complain about," said RNC chairman Michael Steele. "For a long time we didn't know if we would be saying that the President was sending too many of our young men and women to die in Afghanistan or that he was abandoning the cause of democracy there and creating a safe haven for terrorism. Thankfully, he took so long in making up his mind that we had time to work up killer smear campaigns against both."

Cast in this light, Barack Obama is the new LBJ escalating a difficult and morally ambiguous war half way around the world for the lack of a better idea. Under that logic, the death of any American soldier will be blood on his hands. If he had gone the other way, of course, any terror attack anywhere in the world would be blood on his hands. The best aspect of this comparison for Republicans is that it implies that he will be shamed into not running for another term. And who could blame the guy? Washing the blood off of his hands every twenty minutes has got to get old after a while.

But the White House still insists that the President is in this to win it and that the temporary troop increase should give Afghans the breather they need to form a stable government. That puts Republicans in the position of arguing that surges don't work. Lucky for them, long-term memory has never been a strength for rank and file Republicans.