Taylor says "there is no doubt." I find that to be, well, wrong. As discussed last night, a reading of the transcript leads me to believe that Reid was referencing Alberto Gonzales as "incompetent." Let's review the transcript:

BLOGGER QUESTION: What's the next step on Gonzales? REID: Well, I guess the President, he's gotten rid of Pace because he could not get confirmed here in the Senate. Pace is also a yes-man for the President. I told him to his face, I laid it out last time he came in to see me. I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was. But he got rid of his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, but he still hangs on to this failed Attorney General. And I guess he's gonna [inaudible]. We're gonna keep focusing on it. Every day that goes by, it seems he keeps giving. Now we've learned that the immigration judges are all graduates of Regent University I guess.

(Emphasis supplied.) There is no way anyone can say "there is no doubt" who in the heck Reid called incompetent. Was it Bush, Gonzales or Pace? Marsh can not pretend to know without a doubt. Let's be clear. If the persons who heard that DID believe without a doubt that Reid had said then they should have blogged about it in my opinion. It was clearly newsworthy in my opinion. Reid calling Bush incompetent? Been there. Done that. Reid called Gonzales incompetent on the floor of the Senate THAT VERY DAY! Non-story. But calling Pace incompetent? He has never done that publically and, as far as I can tell, still hasn't.

Marsh says "[t]he question now is, why in the world did Reid let this hang out there all day without confirming it?"

Well, actually he didn't. He responded in this fashion:

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, delivered a critical assessment on Thursday of Gen. Peter Pace’s performance as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and demanded that Congress be given a “fair, honest and frank” report about conditions in Iraq when it receives a progress report in September. “General Peter Pace is a distinguished military veteran and public servant,” Mr. Reid said. “Unfortunately, in my opinion, he was never as candid as he should have been about the conduct and progress of this war.” . . . Mr. Reid’s comments came after he drew unusually harsh criticism from the White House after a report by The Politico, a Washington newspaper, that he had suggested that General Pace was “incompetent.” Aides to Mr. Reid would neither confirm nor deny whether he had used that characterization of General Pace during a telephone conference call earlier this week with liberal bloggers.

I think the reason why they did not confirm or deny the allegation is because they did not know if he had said it. To date, one person, Bob Geiger, has said that Reid said it. We now have the transcript which, in my opinion, hardly makes clear that Reid did say it. On the contrary, I think it demonstrates he likely said it about Alberto Gonzales.

Now here is the real problem in my opinion - if Reid had said it, would we be applauding? I would not. It would have been incredibly stupid of Reid to create this unnecessary firestorm over Pace, who is on his way out. Yet it seems that Reid would have been backed in such a stupid move. Is it true that Pace is incompetent? Does it matter? Pace is out. Why cause problems for the drive to end the war with a now irrelevant truth?

Indeed, it is time to focus on the part of Reid's statement YESTERDAY that really does matter:

“It is incumbent upon the president, the Pentagon and our commanders in the field to give us the information that we need to hear, not what we want to hear,” Mr. Reid said. “It is the only way we in Congress will be able to make the right decisions as we work to change course in Iraq and responsibly end this war.”

Yep, about Septemeber. Eugene Rbinson has a great column today on the September backslide:

Here's a surprise: Remember how we were told that if we just waited until the fall, we'd see that George W. Bush's "surge" was working in Iraq? Well, now it turns out that we shouldn't expect answers in September after all.

White House spokesman Tony Snow was purposeful on Wednesday in stomping, trampling, tap-dancing upon and otherwise giving a definitive beat-down to any expectations of a serious, fact-based reassessment of Iraq policy in the fall. Never mind that the White House raised those expectations in the first place.

The September scenario has been a rhetorical mainstay for the administration and its supporters, a major argument for ignoring all the bad news from Iraq and giving Bush's troop escalation a chance to work. Let's wait for Gen. David H. Petraeus, the man who's now running the war, to submit his progress report. At that point, went the White House argument, the "way forward" would become clear.

The fog of war seems to have closed back in. "I have warned from the very beginning about expecting some sort of magical thing to happen in September," Snow told the White House press corps, whose collective recollection was somewhat different. "What I'm saying is, in September you'll have an opportunity to have metrics."

The point Reid makes about demanding candor in September matters. But in the end, this point from Robinson is the one that needs to be absorbed:

Will anything Petraeus says in his September report change Bush's determination to fight on in Iraq toward ill-defined "victory" -- to "win" what has become a multifaceted mess of sectarian warfare that everyone is destined to lose? Almost certainly not. If there is a single encouraging paragraph in the entire document, Bush will seize on it as vindication. Facts on the ground have never been the determining factor in Bush's policy on Iraq. Facts don't even seem to be a particularly important factor. It was considerate of Tony Snow to start preparing us for the inevitable -- and, indirectly, to remind congressional leaders that if they want to change the president's course on Iraq, they won't do it through reasoned persuasion. George Bush can't bring himself to question his basic vision of Iraq, and I doubt he ever will.

Bush and the Republicans will never end the Debacle. Time to come to grips with that. And that applies to Democrats in Congress AND progressives and the Netroots. Time to stop waiting for the Godot Republicans.