The Democrats: Profiles in Cowardice

CAN YOU SPOT REED AND PELOSI?

The retreat of the Democratic congressional majority from trying to force the White House to delineate an Iraq war exit strategy, as well as agreeing to a timetable for wholesale troop withdrawals, is yet another shameful chapter in the Age of Bush.

Using the modest and temporary successes of the surge strategy as a fig leaf, the very Democratic leaders who insisted in the wake of the party's mid-term election victory that nothing less than bringing the troops home ASAP would do, have now set the bar so low that their new goal is to trying to get their Republican colleagues to agree to modest short-term troop withdrawals.

President Bush, a master of cooptation even without Uncle Karl at his side, kind of sort of proposed doing exactly that in a fly-by photo op at an air base in Anbar Province over the weekend.

The Democrats’ about-face primarily is a result of two things:

* A wholesale defection of Republicans from the president's side has not occurred and the Democrats are still short of the filibuster-proof 60 votes that they need in the Senate to pass legislation that would set deadlines, let alone the two-thirds majority in both chambers required to override a presidential veto. The forecast calls for rain – and Dems compromising their asses off.

* Ever and overly sensitive to being labeled as intransigent, the Democrats have abandoned the tactic of trying to block votes on alternatives to setting deadlines. Their second worst nightmare is being blamed by the GOP for forcing a bloody end to the war and the chaos that will ensue no matter when the U.S. leaves. Their worst nightmare, of course, is blowing the 2008 election.

This bring us to the part of the movie where your Civics class teacher, or whatever they're calling that subject these days, asks whether compromise is not better than defeat.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would vote for compromise.

But these are not ordinary times, and the Democratic capitulation to the White House over the last six-plus years, most recently on another dangerous expansion of Bush’s power to spy on Americans, is a grim reminder that the absence of a loyal opposition has pretty much allowed the president to run unchecked.

That is because in the end the Democrats are much more concerned about job security than national security.