You didn’t even need to pick up a copy of the New York Post this morning to know the paper’s oh-so-predictable verdict on President Obama’s speech at West Point. In fact you didn’t even have to watch the paper’s stable mates at Fox last night to know what was coming. Because it’s been coming for months. For his legion of well-heeled and widely-distributed critics, the bottom line is simply, if it’s coming out of Obama’s mouth or Obama’s White House it is, by definition, bad, misguided, and probably un-American. Their talking point: timetables are for pussies.

Funny thing is the preaction from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and it’s enablers in the blogosphere was just as predictable. They have signaled from the start of the Afghanistan conversation that more troops — escalation — was a terrible, dangerous decision they could not support. Now that the Iraq War is winding down it’s no time to up the ante on another foreign adventure whose subtitle is “Quagmire.” Their talking point: Vietnam.

What seems to be missing here is an undeniable fact which Obama helpfully reminded America about right at the start of his (too) lengthy speech:

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaida and those who harbored them — an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.

No one has really argued that the threat from al-Qaida has vanished. Indeed Obama’s critics on both sides (many of whom participated in those votes) acknowledge the criminal terrorist gangs have regrouped along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But to say (as some progressives do) that this wouldn’t be the case had Bush not redirected the effort to Iraq where al-Qaida had no personnel and no bases, is a red herring. Yes it’s true history will almost certainly regard Bush’s Iraq dance as a sham and a distraction but that doesn’t mean al-Qaida isn’t alive and well in Afghanistan. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold makes a more convincing case in questioning whether more troops now, years after military commanders on the ground began asking for them, will actually work. He raises valid questions and he may be right but Obama is betting additional troops will make the difference. There is no demonstrably right answer. It’s a toss of the dice either way with our national security at stake.

On the other hand to argue that Obama’s decision is late (a total lie, as the AP helpfully points out on Fox’s website) or that in setting a deadline he is sending a message to the terrorists to,

Wait it out. Blend in. Pretend to be a non-terrorist until July of 2011, then all will be well.

is kinda bizarre. That last quote was from the radical Christian radioman Kevin McCullough whose “analysis” of the Obama speech was prominently featured on Fox’s website yesterday evening. He spins the yarn that setting objectives and deadlines is handing al-Qaida a gift. We’ll be hearing that non-stop for a while I suspect since conservatives have been pushing for big troop deployments to Afghanistan for months. But doing a troop surge and then setting deadlines for withdrawal is precisely what Bush eventually did in Iraq and, much to the chagrin of his critics, it worked better than anything else he tried. Indeed Bush’s conservative defenders say liberals refuse to give him credit for accomplishing what those critics said he wouldn’t with the surge.

What last night’s speech really did was make plain that there are no good choices here and that while our last President governed with his gut, this one is governing with his head. To some that may sound like an improvement but it doesn’t mean he’s gonna get it right either.