Last week, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) announced that he will not seek re-election in 2008. In his e-mail newsletter today, Robert Novak reported that Hastert won’t be finishing out his term and will retire on Nov. 6:

An Illinois Republican source tells us former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) plans to resign November 6 this year instead of finishing out his term. This would create a vacancy and trigger a special election in the 14th District.

Under Illinois statute, the governor, Rod Blagojevich (D), would get to pick the date of both of the special general election and the special primary election (with separate ballots for each party). The general election would have to be within 120 days of the vacancy (meaning by early March, if the November 6 resignation date holds). February 5 is the date for Illinois’s presidential and congressional primaries, and slating the special election — either the primaries or the general — on that date would save state money.

In her first public comments since her husband’s death by friendly fire, Marie Tillman, wife of NFL athlete-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman, said that the nation needs real leaders. “We are in need of authentic leadership on many levels,” said Tillman.

In his speech today, President Bush cited “Graham Greene’s classic Vietnam novel ‘The Quiet American’ which is essentially a contemplation on the road to hell being paved with good intentions.” The Swamp writes: “By reminding people of Greene’s book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?”

On MSNBC’s Hardball tonight, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who is leading a White House front group to defend Bush’s escalation, was unable to name the wounded Iraq veteran featured in his organization’s pro-war ad. “I don’t have his name in front of me,” said Fleischer when asked by host Mike Barnicle if he knew the soldier’s name.

Later in the program, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America executive director Paul Rieckhoff ripped into Fleischer’s offensive ignorance. “What bothered me the most is that Ari Fleischer didn’t even know the guy’s name.” said Rieckhoff. “He’s willing to run a multi-million dollar campaign, utilizing the personal story of a soldier, and he couldn’t tell you on national TV what that soldier’s name is.”

Rieckhoff described it as part of “a problematic trend” that Freedom’s Watch is using the soldier’s “personal story” as “a backdrop for political rhetoric”:

People on both sides of the aisle, but especially the president and this administration, have continued to use troops as a political prop. As a backdrop for political rhetoric. It’s why the president gave such an impassionate speech today in front of the VFW. It’s why this ad carries so much weight on a visceral level. And it really bothers me because our troops are not political props and they’re not chew toys.

Watch it:

Fleischer and his team of Bush surrogates are spending $15 million to run the ad featuring the soldier, whose name is John Kriesel, in 20 states for a month. Hopefully, Fleischer will remember his name from now on.

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Returning from a trip to Iraq, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Bob Corker (R-TN) “gave an upbeat report on progress in Iraq” to reporters this morning, saying they saw “clear success, province by province“:

Alexander said a strategy devised by Petraeus to work with local leaders and win them over to the U.S. cause has shown “clear success, province by province.”

“They are fed up with random murders of their children” by al-Qaida terrorists, he said.

“There are probably seven provinces where enough progress has been made to involve Iraqis in their own security,” claimed Alexander during the call with reporters.

Unmentioned in press accounts of Alexander and Corker’s trip, however, is the fact that they only spent half a day on the ground in Iraq.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH), who organized the trip (which also included Sen. David Vitter), told reporters that only 10-14 hours out of their four-day trip was spent in Iraq. Voinovich’s communications director, Chris Paulitz, confirmed the duration of the delegation’s trip to ThinkProgress.

Despite the superficial, in and out nature of their trip, Corker and Alexander are pronouncing “significant progress” on the ground in Iraq. As former Washington Post Baghdad correspondent Jonathan Finer wrote this weekend, “there is good reason to be skeptical of such snapshot accounts“:

It goes without saying that everyone can, and in this country should, have an opinion about the war, no matter how much time the person has spent in Iraq, if any. But having left a year ago, I’ve stopped pretending to those who ask that I have a keen sense of what it’s like on the ground today. Similarly, those who pass quickly through the war zone should stop ascribing their epiphanies to what are largely ceremonial visits.

While politicians who spend a few hours in the “dog-and-pony show are claiming “significant progress,” soldiers who have been on the ground for 15 months are seeing a very different picture: “mounting civil, political and social unrest.”

Yesterday, GQ writer Ben Wallace, who recently wrote a profile on Glenn Beck, told the CNN Headline News host that he was “good at pushing the buttons of a certain, you know, set of bloggers, and so.” Beck responding by dismissing bloggers: “I mean, they all live in their mom’s basement anyway, so what difference does that make?” Watch it:

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In his speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars today, President Bush declared that the lesson of Vietnam is that we must not withdraw from Iraq. UCLA historian Robert Dallek, who has written about the comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, says Bush is “twisting history” with his new analogy:

“It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president,” he said in a telephone interview.

“We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,” he said.

“What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,” he continued. “We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.”

(HT: Karen Tumulty)