[dude1394]

From captainsquartersblog re-capping how Harry Reid can't even surrender worth a damn. First Howard Dean, then Harry Reid. Sometimes it just gets too easy.

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/...ves/012321.php

Shailagh Murray details the long and laughable line of Reid's miscalculations on the war. First, he and Nancy Pelosi took 108 days to get a supplemental funding bill passed, hoping to pressure the White House into ordering a withdrawal that Congress could easily have accomplished by defunding the mission. Instead, with time running out, Congress passed exactly what Bush wanted. Then Reid decided to pull an all-nighter, which turned into a debacle when Republicans actually showed up for it and spent more time on the floor than Reid did, arguing against an early withdrawal.

The final straw for Reid came when he dropped the war debate entirely. He figured that Iraq would get worse and the pressure on Republicans would increase. Unfortunately, Reid miscalculated again. The end of the debate gave the surge some breathing space, and the perception of its success got shaped by actual facts and news rather than Democrat spin.

Now Reid wants to cut a deal, and he's desperate to get it done while he has any credibility left at all. He's broken from his hard-line stance about timetables for withdrawal, and now he's just talking about using back-door methods to get modest troop reductions with no firm date at all to end the mission. After Petraeus reports to Congress on the military progress from the surge and on the political reform agreement engineered by Maliki, Reid will have little standing to declare the war "lost" as he did just a few months ago.

He could pick up some Republicans at the margins. John Warner wants to see a 5,000-troop reduction by Christmas as a token to show that we won't be there forever, even if he has no idea by his own admission which troops should leave and what functions should be abandoned. However, given his actions and rhetoric all year long, few Republicans have any reason to trust Reid or to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Just as in dating, desperation does not attract interest.