THE BENEFITS OF PROCRASTINATION: As one of the laziest men that the good Lord ever saw fit to put on this old earth, I have to tell you that I was genuinely dreading the drudgery that I was planning to let myself in for this afternoon in putting together a halfway cogent response to this post from Ed Morrissey, wherein the Captain argues that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden's recently announced plan for Iraq "gets the entire war on terror fundamentally wrong -- and demonstrates why the Democrats have entirely failed to provide any leadership on Iraq and the wider war." In fact, that damnable dread was really all that prevented me from responding when I first came across Ed's post last night.

But now that the White House has officially embraced the Biden plan, I guess those concerns are all in the past.

The White House has for the first time claimed ownership of an Iraq withdrawal plan, arguing that a troop pullout blueprint unveiled this past week by a Democratic senator was "remarkably similar" to its own.

It also signaled its acceptance of a recent US Senate amendment designed to pave the way for a phased US military withdrawal from the violence-torn country.

The statement by White House spokesman Scott McClellan came in response to a commentary published in The Washington Post by Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he said US forces will begin leaving Iraq next year "in large numbers."

...In the statement, which was released under the headline "Senator Biden Adopts Key Portions Of Administration's Plan For Victory In Iraq," McClellan said the Bush administration welcomed Biden's voice in the debate.

"Today, Senator Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror," the spokesman went on to say.

So it looks like just another day of football and frolic here at O'Toole File world headquarters.

Darn.

NOTE: Via Digby, who, as you might expect, is quite amusing on all this.