FOOLED AGAIN:

A Smoke-Filled War Room (THOMAS B. EDSALL, 3/22/07, NY Times)

The Democratic leadership...instead of hammering Mr. Bush, has busied itself behind closed doors, producing a toothless, loophole-ridden resolution that showcases the party's generic antiwar stance while trying to establish troop readiness requirements, benchmarks for Iraqi progress and withdrawal timetables. The resolution -- more precisely, a set of deals intended to paper over intraparty factions -- is the result of a process better suited to a highway bill than national security.

This patchwork proposal not only demonstrates the House leadership's inability to extract a meaningful consensus from a membership that runs the ideological gamut from the Out of Iraq Caucus on the left to the Blue Dogs on the right. It also risks setting the Democrats up for a poisonous share of responsibility for the failure of United States foreign policy, while amplifying questions regarding Democratic competence on military matters.

Even worse, they're going to be blamed for trying to impede the cause of liberty as happened when they tried saving the Sandinistas and the USSR from Ronald Reagan the last time they thought US policy was failing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 22, 2007 7:19 AM