The Dem's Ellusive Anti-War Vote

Dems are discovering what we've been telling them all along: They did not sweep the Nov. 06 elections on an anti-war vote; they won because people were tired of weak management of the war and the borders by the Bush administration.

Their bold post-election talk now has more waffles than IHOP:

Senior House Democrats, seeking to placate members of their party from Republican-leaning districts, are pushing a plan that would place restrictions on President Bush's ability to wage the war in Iraq but would allow him to waive them if he publicly justifies his position.

Under the proposal, Bush would also have to set a date to begin troop withdrawals if the Iraqi government fails to meet benchmarks aimed at stabilizing the country that the president laid out in January.

The plan is an attempt to bridge the differences between anti-war Democrats, led by Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), who have wanted to devise standards of troop readiness strict enough to force Bush to delay some deployments and bring some troops home, and Democrats wary of seeming to place restrictions on the president's role as commander in chief. (WaPo)

This latest attempt to wring some Pyrrhic victory out of Iraq is a far cry from where the Dems started, when Pelosi and Murtha figured they could ride an anti-war wave into a full blown, white flag waving justification of their out of the mainstream positions on Iraq.

Of course, their latest idea is no less foolish than their previous ones.

Imagine being a champion heavyweight in your prime, fighting under these rules: You can land punches on your opponent pretty much at will and suffer only some body punches in return, but if your opponent can merely distract his corner man, the fight's over and you lose.

How much attention will your opponent give you and how much is he going to give his corner man? That's exactly the rules the Dems want to set, incentivizing Iraq's terrorists to keep up the terror right up to the imposed deadline, continuously destabilizing the government we want to stabilize, so they can smile and dance as the ref declares him the winner -- and the U.S. the loser -- by a unanimous Dem decision.