Politico practices journalism in much the same way that bricks float.* For years, its mission to "win the morning" has often come at the expense of the truth. But with Katie Glueck's piece on Iraq titled "Neocons to Obama: No Half-Measures," the publication Charles Pierce rightly mocks as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" has reached a new low. In her ersatz reporting, Glueck turns to Elliott Abrams, John Yoo, John McCain and other architects of President Bush's world-historical catastrophe in Iraq to attack President Obama's approach to clearing away the rubble they left in their wake.
From the get-go, Politico's Glueck turns to the arsonists to critique Obama for failing to extinguish their fire:

The neocons have a message for President Barack Obama: Don't screw this up.
Former Bush administration officials and other hawkish voices of the Bush era say the Democratic president deserves credit for signing off on airstrikes against an Islamist extremist group on the march in Iraq. But they fear Obama will let his reluctance toward military engagement in the region keep him from striking a death blow against a group of militants with strong anti-Western views.

For starters, Politico turns to Elliott Abrams, whom Glueck identifies as having "served on former President George W. Bush's National Security Council and a man who was "deeply involved in the Reagan administration's policies in Central America." Deeply involved, that is, with his scheme to sell weapons to Iran and funnel the proceeds in violation of U.S. law to the Contras in Nicaragua. Abrams was pardoned for his role in Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal by President George H.W. Bush. That blank slate allowed him to serve as one of the masterminds behind Dubya's calamitous Iraq war. Just two years ago, Abrams used his position as national security adviser to Mitt Romney to argue that Congress should authorize the use of force against his former customer, Iran.
Politico presents many of the other usual suspects as subject matter experts. Ms. Glueck resurrected Max Boot, whose most famous contribution to the Iraq debate came in May 2004 when he chastised Americans for their unease over the progress of the war. "Recent low-casualty conflicts have spoiled the U.S." he wrote, "In fact, the Iraq loss rate is among our smallest ever."
John Yoo also makes an appearance to slam Obama, taking a brief hiatus from his advocacy of presidential power to crush children's testicles and defining torture as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Politico similarly asked Ari Fleischer to take Obama to the woodshed despite the former Bush press secretary's shocking March 2009 explanation for why his boss attacked Saddam Hussein in the first place:

"After September 11th having been hit once how could we take a chance that Saddam might strike again? And that's the threat that has been removed and I think we are all safer with that threat removed."

Then there's John McCain. As Politico noted, McCain mocked the man who vanquished him in 2008 by noting Obama had deemed the ISIS terrorists "jayvee." What Politico did not note--as I did--is that when it came to Iraq, John McCain was disastrously wrong:

McCain didn't merely long ago declare Afghanistan a "success" where the United States could "muddle through." From his predictions of a short war in Iraq, claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators there and that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over Sunni and Shiite and so much more, John McCain utterly failed his own commander-in-chief test.

So here's a little memo for Katie Glueck and her editors at Politico. First, until President Obama appears on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit and an oversized cod piece, no neoconservative can ever accuse of him of taking too much credit for any national security success. Second, when it comes to Iraq, no one who has been as consistently and catastrophically wrong as the neocons should be criticizing Barack Obama about anything.
* Thanks to the late Douglas Adams for the floating bricks analogy.