The GabFest is sponsored by Audible, the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio entertainment.

GabFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership at Audiblepodcast.com slash gabfest.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, December 4th, 2009.

I'm David Plotz here in Washington, D.C. all alone.

All alone except joining me by video chat is Emily Bazelon from New Haven.

And then over the phone is the indefatigable John Dickerson, who is in San Francisco,

working hard for Slate, but is not here to host, so I'm hosting in his stead.

And our producers, Andy Bouvet and Andy Bowers deserve an honorary medal for having patched all this together.

I can't really imagine how they did it.

It's all magic, Emily. It's magic. There are no wires required. It's just magic. Today we're

going to talk about three topics, as always. Number one will be Afghanistan. Number two is going to be

the climate change kerfuffle and the upcoming Copenhagen conference, which had a lot of Cs and

K sounds in there. And then we're going to talk about Mike Huckabee and the trouble he's in with

conservatives over his pardon of cop killer Maurice Clemens. So let's start with topic A.

And that's going to be Afghanistan.

John, the president gave a big speech, announced a new strategy, and then sent to Capitol Hill, his secretary of state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his secretary of defense, the scarecrow and Mrs. King, all to talk about his new Afghanistan strategy.

What did you think of the speech he gave and what's the path forward for him? And does it look

like the proposed surge in Afghanistan is winning the support that he needs?

I think the thing that still sticks to my mind, first of all, is that basically since Obama's been president, he's tripled the number of troops going to Afghanistan. I think that's just this big fact that I keep kind of coming back to because, you know, that's a big escalation. It's a huge commitment. And it also puts a lot of weight on the other side of

all of that weight and all those new troops and this deeper commitment is the kind of incredibly

complex and still confusing situation in Afghanistan and confusing because, A, it's hard to explain,

B, it's hard for a president to explain out loud because there are a lot of things he can't say,

...