"MESSAGE COORDINATION? GLAD TO HELP OUT, KARL."
"WHY, THANK YOU, ADAM."

Lovely to see that Karl Rove got Jim Rutenberg and our old friend Adam Nagourney to retype a big fat list of GOP talking points on the war and plop them in the middle of this article, "Rallied by Bush, Skittish G.O.P. Now Embraces War as Issue," which is the lead story on the New York Times Web site as I write this:

...meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

Republicans say the cumulative effect would be to send a message of weakness to the world at a time of new threats from Iran and North Korea and would leave enemies controlling Iraq's vast oil reserves, the third largest in the world....

"The fundamental question," [Republican chairman Ken] Mehlman said, "is if you think the enemy is more brutal than before, is the answer that you should surrender?"

And it's curious that this happens at the exact moment when Senator Santorum and Congressmen Hoekstra are suddenly rising up to talk about very old, degraded chemical weapons in Iraq as if they're newly discovered, dangerous WMDs and thus a justification for the war.

And the radio ad I mentioned in my last post -- the one from the allegedly "non-partisan, not-for-profit organization" Move America Forward? Well, that ad was one of three MAF announced yesterday. The other two are a TV ad and a radio ad ticking off all the nasty terrorists and dictators we've rolled up in Iraq (and Afghanistan), and all the lovely schools and roads we've built. (Watch the TV ad at YouTube here.)

Clearly the Republican effort to make the Iraq War seem like an excellent idea moved forward on several fronts in the last day or two. And good old Adam Nagourney did his bit, telling us that Republicans are saying, "Yeah, I support the war -- you got a problem with that?" Getting this story into the Times was as big a part of the GOP reelection effort as the MAF ads or the Santorum/Hoekstra announcement. Nice of Nagourney and Rutenberg to make it so easy.