Froomkin: Bush and his crowd makes a lot of boastful predictions, but "their confidence is meaningless" and they're wrong

Froomkin has a typically astute column today titled, Put A Fork in Him. The "him" in question is, of course, George W. Bush. There is one particularly salient section about the Bush team's swagger and confidence -- and how that is usually off-base and just plain wrong. In fact, when team Bush does make a prediction, they're almost always puffery backed up by nothing real. Yet, time after time, the punditry has fallen for it.

Froomkin makes it real by tying Bush's patterns for inaccurate predictions to his spin on Iraq. If George Bush is wrong about everything, why should we believe anything he says will happen in the disastrous war he started? We shouldn't:

Bush and Vice President Cheney's optimistic predictions about the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular have proved to be almost completely and consistently wrong for years now. ("Last throes," anyone?)

Before the 2006 election, White House political guru Karl Rove was supremely self-assured in his public predictions of Republican victory.

White House spokesman Tony Snow recently assured the press corps that Bush had enough votes in the Senate on the immigration bill. "I'll see you at the bill signing," Bush himself told a skeptical journalist on June 11.

Bush and his staff's credibility regarding statements of "fact" is a frequent subject of debate. But their track record on predictions is something else entirely. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that those predictions are unreliable.

I mention this because Bush's core argument against a troop drawdown in Iraq -- something supported by a large majority of Americans -- is basically a prediction. As he put it again yesterday: "If we withdraw before the Iraqi government can defend itself, we would yield the future of Iraq to terrorists like al Qaeda -- and we would give a green light to extremists all throughout a troubled region. The consequences for America and the Middle East would be disastrous."

The consequences for America and the Middle East have already been disastrous because Bush was wrong. Based on Bush's track record, these latest predictions on Iraq aren't going to be accurate either.