Posted on 05/03/2007 9:00:35 PM PDT by neverdem
Nancy Pelosi's House Democrats did not seriously imagine they were going to override President Bush's veto of the misbegotten war-funding measure, which indeed they didn't, but they went through the motions anyway, one of the great modern exercises in symbolic wheel-spinning. And now the thing is done with.
Done with, as in arbitrarily fixed troop-withdrawal deadlines being off the table. Now that congressional Democrats have banged heads with an immovable chief executive, and come away ruefully concluding that, well, no, maybe they're not really going to, as Joe Biden so elegantly put it, stuff their demands down his throat, perhaps conditions are propitious for the discussion of new ideas that might actually be useful.
Informing the bad guys exactly when we intend to fold up and quit the battlefield is not fundamentally one of those very useful ideas, and good riddance to it. That said, those who are distressed by the course of the war could well advance notions that are worth considering.
The compromises that the White House and Capitol Hill are probably bound to find over the next few weeks will presumably revolve around the freshly resurrected "benchmark" issue, and it is indeed all too true that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hasn't yet done much of a crackerjack job at his end of things and surely could use a good whop or two upside the head. Such basic matters as, for example, the equitable distribution of Iraqi oil revenues remain quite unsettled, indeed barely addressed. There would be nothing wrong in calling for progress reports.
As for daily Baghdad security - well, some 4,000 new U.S. soldiers are arriving in town this week, so the troop-surge crackdown has really only just begun, and it's still the case that American commanders will want to give it a few months to work. Maybe it will. Maybe it won't. That's an assessment to be made down the road. Gen. David Petraeus has promised an accounting come September.
At least until that time, congressional Democrats have no business braying that the war is already lost. For the moment, anyway, we hope they've gotten that out of their systems.
Drop dead, Dems.*****
Fixed =)
Ried, Pelosi, and the rest of the wheel spiners should go join Al-Queda and get it over with already.
They have screamed it for ages and they mean it. Rational men cannot believe they will mean it, but they do.
They cannot pass it directly, but they will not need to. They will just fail to come together on any practical plan, and then they will blame Bush for turning them down.
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