This morning’s postings describe the desperate efforts by Secretary Rice and Israeli politicians to claim the U.N. ceasefire is a victory for the good guys represents nothing more than a beautifying effort — they’re putting lipstick on a pig. There’s one reason only to cut Condi some slack here. I think it’s pretty clear that we could have given Ehud Olmert and his government six months to do the job in South Lebanon and they wouldn’t have done it. They didn’t want to do it. It took them 30 days to get boots on the ground there. They kept hitting the Hezbollah neighborhood in Beirut in what seems like a hapless effort to decapitate the terror group’s leadership, and they would have continued to do that until even Jackie Mason would have declared they had gone too far. The Bush administration didn’t impede Israel. The Israeli government impeded Israel.