Dems Can't Find Enough Republicans To Help Them Surrender

By Rick Moran

You almost have to feel sorry for them, these Democrats. They've been running around Capitol Hill these last few weeks, their white flags waving majestically in the breeze, trying to drum up support among the GOP for their plans to surrender Iraq to the forces of death and destruction.

Evidently, they've decided to give up and surrender on their own:

Unable to garner enough Republican support, Senate Democratic leaders said yesterday that they are abandoning a bipartisan effort to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq by next spring.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said that Democrats had been willing to make the troop withdrawal a "goal" in order to attract GOP support, but it never materialized. Instead, Reid will again push for a firm deadline, this time June 2008, along with a stronger effort at cutting off war funding.

"It's all definite timelines," Reid said.

No word yet on when the engraved invitations to al-Qaeda are going out, inviting them to fill the vacuum when America troops leave (No RSVP required).

One has to admit that this is pretty cynical, even for Democrats:

They now believe their best political strategy is to continue to play to a stalemate and blame an intransigent President Bush and his Republican congressional allies for refusing to negotiate an end to the war.

“We haven’t found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday. “I think they’ve decided they definitely want this to be the Republican Senate’s war, not just Bush’s [war]. They’re jealous. They don’t want him to have it as only his war.”

Aside from the rank cynicism of the strategy, that may be the lamest, the silliest political barb uttered this century. Nearly incoherent, it makes one wonder what time of day our Harry was quoted and from which Capitol Hill watering hole he was staggering away from.

Let's face it. There is no "redeployment" strategy. For the Democrats and their rabid base, it is about withdrawal. And if the netroots get their way, that withdrawal won't even leave a corporal's guard by the time they're done. The moderate Republicans in the Senate seem to be holding - barely. It remains to be seen whether the constant pressure by both the Dems and voters will wear them down and cause them to break with Bush and vote for retreat.