The AP’s Ron Fournier has returned from his failed Hotsoup venture to write strange “analysis” articles for the news service, including one titled “Is Edwards Real or a Phony?” and another titled “Obama Presidency a ‘Stretch’ for Voters.”

The latest installment in the “Do Democrats Suck?” series is titled “Obama a ‘Courageous Leader’?”

Nobody can dispute that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war from the start and, with striking prescience, predicted U.S. troops would be mired in a costly conflict that fanned “the flames of the Middle East.”

But nobody should accept at face value the Illinois senator’s claim that he was a “courageous leader” who opposed the war at great political risk.

The truth is that while Obama showed foreign policy savvy and an ability to keenly analyze both sides of an issue in his October 2002 warnings on Iraq, the political upside of his position rivaled any risk.

And, once elected to the U.S. Senate two years later, Obama waited months to show national leadership on Iraq.

However, as in the Edwards case, Fournier is passing off his own judgment as an objective assessment of a fundamentally non-testable claim. There’s no definitive way to address whether a leader is phony or courageous. And the framing of these articles seems tilted against Democrats. As I said before, I’m waiting for the “Giuliani: Sane or Crazy?” piece.