James Lindgren writes a simple summary of the last week's worth of news:

We are playing a game of expectations--some reasonable, some not. Like a New Hampshire primary in which a winner is treated as a loser because he did not win by as wide a margin as pundits expected, the war's domestic opponents keep raising the bar for success.

Yep. That's what it was like listening to Mark Shields last week sadly discussing the looting as if it made the whole endeavor a humiliating rout.