After (appropriately) mocking Mickey Kaus for relying on a single report from a blogger to evaluate the prospects for the “surge,” Kevin Drum makes an important point about the blogger tendency to overreact to news from Iraq:

A consistent mistake made by a fair number of partisans on both sides — Andrew Sullivan is the archetype here — is to make way too much out of individual day-to-day incidents. Occasionally this is legitimate (the Golden Mosque bombing, for example), but usually it’s just simpleminded emotionalism. Purple thumbs: whee, democracy is coming! Helicopter crash: boo, Iraq is a hopeless mess!

But there are always going to be bits of good news and bits of bad news out of Iraq. What matters more are the underlying dynamics…

That’s exactly right. And as Drum says, the underlying dynamics remain sadly unfavorable to the US and the “surge.”