Dating

From The New York Times:

Congressional Democrats agreed Monday to ignore President Bush’s veto threat and send him a $124 billion war spending bill that orders the administration to begin pulling troops out of Iraq by Oct. 1.

Sweet Lord, can you imagine troops starting to come home from that civil war in October? What relief that will be, should this bill pass, and should that petulant bully Bush be forced to sign it.

There's some non-binding final March 31, 20087 language in there, but the fact that Bush/Cheney Co. are so incensed by it means it is the right move. This is a flipping of the rationale for military policy in Iraq, the false rationals of the GOP led by those two corporate criminals falling to the will of America, as expressed overwhelmingly last November and in current polls.

When Harry Reid said he had told a very cross Presidente in the White House that the war had been lost and even some mainstream Washingtonian journalists said he had made some sort of colossal error, it was Reid who was right. Truth to power. What everyone knows. He later amended it to the "we won already, Saddam is gone, no WMDs, now let's go" argument, but everyone knows what's really going on here.

Bush isn't being a statesman regarding Iraq. Paul Krugman argues he's holding our troops hostage:

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

Only a self-centered moron or a calculating gangster could have reacted to the Alberto Gonzales hearings like this.

Give the President some dates not of his own choosing. Because the only one he's really concerned about is January 20, 2009.

Because that's the day he's planning to walk away scot free.