. . . and so does David Broder, who simply has slipped into utter incoherence. But let's read Buckley:

It is simply untrue that we are making decisive progress in Iraq. The indicators rise and fall from day to day, week to week, month to month. In South Vietnam there was an organized enemy. There is clearly organization in the strikes by the terrorists against our forces and against the civil government in Iraq, but whereas in Vietnam we had Hanoi as the operative headquarters of the enemy, we have no equivalent of that in Iraq, and that is a matter of paralyzing importance. . . . How can the Republican party, headed by a president determined on a war he can’t see an end to, attract the support of a majority of the voters?

Broder said:

[V]ictory in Iraq -- whether that's achievable is really doubtful.

Treason!

I wonder if Joe thinks this is a good plan:

BLITZER: Foreign Minister . . . there's concern here in Washington — Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, raised it — that your parliament is about to take a two-month vacation in the midst of all of these challenges. . . . ZEBARI: . . . In fact, the recess is two months. And we discussed that issue. That really this should be cut down to two weeks or one week because business is not as usual in our country. . .

What will Susan Collins say?

If the president's new strategy does not demonstrate significant results by August, then Congress should consider all options . . .

I predict she'll say '[i]f the president's new strategy does not demonstrate results by August March 2008, then Congress should consider all options.' And so on . . .

Master McCarthyite Smearer Joe Lieberman sez:

And I do think there is a larger message here for our politics. I think the public is fed up. They feel that both the political parties, mostly because of the primaries, maybe because of attack ads, the kind of divisiveness of the cable news coverage of politics, talk radio, the bloggers have added another dimension of vituperation toxicity to it. The majority of people are sick of it.

No Joe, they are sick of the Bush/McCain/Lieberman/GOP Iraq Debacle:

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the situation with Iraq?"
Approve Disapprove Unsure

24% 71% 5%

Here is some cackle material from Joe:

I think if the two major parties wouldn’t hear this going into ‘08, there is a real chance of an independent third-party candidacy. and watch out if that happens.

Bwahahahahahahahaha!!!! Joe still pining for the White House. Hilarious.

In the Democratic Presidential Debate. Sen. Hillary Clinton said:

"we need Republican support" to achieve the Democratic goal of leaving Iraq.

Sen. Barack Obama said:

We have to gather up 16 [Republican] votes to override [President Bush's] veto.

We'll be waiting for Godot then. The Republicans will never ever cross Bush on Iraq. Here is some evidence:

The experiences of the few Republicans to vote against the war help explain the remarkable unity that the party has maintained in Washington behind an unpopular president. Just four Republicans -- two in the House, two in the Senate -- voted last week for a $124 billion war funding bill that would require troop withdrawals to begin by Oct. 1, legislation that Bush has vowed to veto. That cohesion reflects the views of the GOP's core voters, who see the war in Iraq in fundamentally different terms than Democrats and political independents do, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

This reality is reflected in this article:

My old Kossack friend Kid Oakland uses my analysis of the Iraq Supplemental Funding bill and turns in a very nifty piece of political analysis:

. . . Nancy Pelosi, in my view, is banking on the "political" aspects of this process. ie. Speaker Pelosi, in using language counting on "the courts," really is implying the "court of public opinion." She must be thinking that whatever Bush's obligation to follow the framework of the Iraq bill, if he does not follow the language that Congress provides him, the GOP will be under such enormous political pressure in the court of public opinion that the GOP will cave. That, in a sense, was the bottom line upshot of the blogger's conference call. There was an interesting moment, which I did not mention in that MyDD piece, in which Speaker Pelosi talked about how, at the time of the outset of the war in Afghanistan the the Presient and the GOP very much did not want a bill from Congress. They felt that the President had all the authority he needed. Congressional Democrats insisted on getting a bill because having some bill, any bill, implied some constraint on the President's authority. If that is the mindset here, a mindset of "implied constraint" then it is critical we put pressure on the Democrats in Congress to go beyond that view. Implied constraint on this President does not cut it. Implied constraint is NOT what the voters voted for in 2006.

The inadequacy of implied constraint. Wonderfully phrased by Kid O. That gets to the heart of it. Bush does not give a fig about "implied constraint." It will take more. It will take the NOT spending power.

My obsession with urging this Congress to adopt what I believe to be the only viable approach to ending the Iraq Debacle while Bush is President, adopting the goals of Reid-Feingold as the policy of the Democratic Congress. My formulation is this:

I ask for three things: First, announce NOW that the Democratic Congress will NOT fund the Iraq Debacle after a date certain. You pick the date. Whatever works politically. If October 2007 is the date Dems can agree to, then let it be then. If March 2008, then let that be the date; Second, spend the year reminding the President and the American People every day that Democrats will not fund the war past the date certain; Third, do NOT fund the Iraq Debacle PAST the date certain.

I believe the need for THIS Congress ending the Debacle is especially acute because the next President will be very reluctant to be saddled with having "lost" the war. Today, on the McLaughlin Group, Tony Blankley articulated my fear, that a Democratic President will not end the Debacle, instead slipping into some "sensible, sober" Broderist mindset. I believe Blankley is right. And of course, a Republican might win the election in 2008. It is thus incumbent on this Congress, this Democratic Congress, to end the Iraq Debacle.

David Broder and Fred Hiatt both seem intent on destroying what little is left of the reputation of the Washington Post Opinion pages. Earlier Broder talked crooked about McCain's "straight talk". Today, Hiatt makes it up on McCain's delusion:

The central issue of this election is the war in Iraq, and the senator is the candidate most identified with making the case for war in the first place and for not leaving precipitously now. He did not shrink from the issue in his announcement, admitting the war "has not gone well" and referring to it in appropriately cautionary terms. . . . Mr. McCain did not say so, but he has been making these points since well before the invasion. Whatever your position on the war, then or now, Mr. McCain deserves credit for foresight and consistency about how the war should have been waged.

Hiatt is not telling the truth here. McCain did not consistently say these things. I will evidence this on the flip.

As President Bush continues to dig in on staying the course in Iraq, our troops keep dying. Nine were killed this weekend.

April has been the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Iraq this year. The latest deaths raise to nearly 100 the number of U.S. soldiers killed this month.

Via Kevin Drum, the NYTimes tells us what we already knew, Bush's surge policy is a sham, merely designed to run out the clock on Iraq while Bush is President:

The Bush administration will not try to assess whether the troop increase in Iraq is producing signs of political progress or greater security until September, and many of Mr. Bush’s top advisers now anticipate that any gains by then will be limited, according to senior administration officials.

In interviews over the past week, the officials made clear that the White House is gradually scaling back its expectations for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. The timelines they are now discussing suggest that the White House may maintain the increased numbers of American troops in Iraq well into next year.

. . . Several American officials who have spoken recently with Mr. Maliki say they believe that he would like to achieve the kind of political reconciliation that Mr. Bush outlined in January as the ultimate goal of the troop increase. But they say the Iraqi prime minister appears to have little ability to manage the required legislation, including bills requiring fair distribution of oil revenues among Iraq’s Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and reversing the American-led de-Baathification that barred many Sunnis from participation in the new government.

(Emphasis supplied.) This is predictable. Bush's feelings are what drive policy now. We can't have him face the fact that he lost the Iraq Debacle and is the worst President in history. That he destroys our military, irreparably damages our national interest and causes the needless deaths of our soldiers is of no moment compared to his feelings.

Disgusting.

This comment really annoyed me for some reason. So I decided to republish a piece I wrote that I think responds to it. Please forgive me this personal privilege.

The War Over The Debacle
by Armando

Sat Oct 22, 2005 at 10:52:24 AM PDT

Over at the normally cool TPM Cafe, there has been a pretty hot exchange going on between the Liberal Iraq Debacle Hawks (I use the word Debacle instead of War because I think it is important that we be clear that what they advocated for is a Debacle, whether they thought it would be one or not.) and those who opposed the Iraq conflict.

I won't get into the details of the debate - I think Matt Yglesias and Sam Rosenfeld wrote the definitive piece on the issue, but I wanted to note this churlish response from George Packer:

Josh Marshall writes:

With Harry Reid's controversial 'war is lost' quote and with various other pols weighing in on whether we can 'win' or whether it's 'lost', it's a good time to consider what the hell we're actually talking about. . . . The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq's threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves with the US.

Rationale 'A' quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate. That left us with premise or rationale 'B'. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we'd overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren't interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war's supporters had in mind. . . . This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region.

. . . It's a huge distortion to say that this means the war was 'lost'. . . . Of course, the damage that's been done over the last four years of denial is immense . . . The reality though is that the disaster has already happened. Admitting that isn't a mistake or something to be feared. It's the first step to repairing the damage. . . .

This is exactly right but understates the case. I'll explain on the other side.

From AP's lips to . . .:

A defiant Democratic-controlled Senate passed legislation Thursday that would require the start of troop withdrawals from Iraq by Oct. 1, propelling Congress toward a historic veto showdown with President Bush on the war. At the White House, the president immediately promised a veto.

I love this quote from McConnell:

"The solution is simple: Take out the surrender date, take out the pork, and get the funds to our troops," said Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell says ignore the will of the American People and just bow to the Boy-King. Nice. I have another idea - why not set a date certain where Congress will no longer fund the Bush/Lieberman/McConnell/McCain/GOP Iraq Debacle.

Reid-Feingold. That's a simple solution too.

Update [2007-4-26 15:25:57 by Big Tent Democrat]: Yet again, Senator Obama and I disagree: