PUNDIT: Chris Matthews on President Obama's Afghanistan Speech
WEST POINT MILITARY ACADEMY IS: "The enemy camp"
ON AFGHANISTAN WAR: "It has a Rube Goldberg quality."
ON AFGHANISTAN WAR STRATEGY: "It sounds more Rube Goldberg than 'Remember the Alamo.'"
ON OBAMA: "Where's the hope?"
ON DICK CHENEY: "I'm only going by what Dick Cheney, who seems to be the rear guard, if you will, if not the tail gunner of the Bush administration, who is out there blasting away today, in 'Politico,' in that special interview he gave them, where he attacks the president for what he's apparently going to do, which is to come into this war reluctantly."
ON BRIDGE TROLLS(?): "There's always Dick Cheney who jumped it from under his bridge to bite the president's ankle even before he made the speech tonight."
HISTORICAL ANALYSIS: "I always remember the scene in 'Gone With the Wind,' where all the rebels are excited about going to war with the north, a country they can't beat because of its industrial advantage and population advantage. They were going to lose that war eventually."
LATE-NITE BACKTRACK:

He went up there to West Point, okay, and maybe earlier tonight I used the wrong phrase, "enemy camp," but the fact of the matter is that he went up there to a place that's obviously military. People in the voluntary army that - and you have officers up there, people who have been tough. [...] McChrystal, Petraeus identified with the Bush strategy, much tougher, more hawkish. He went up there, it was almost like he telegraphed the fact that he was going to, what, change sides on the issue of dove versus hawk.

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