Republics Need An Exit Strategy

It's partly the ability to count, but Sen. Levin is bringing out a fact that I have been getting into, that the Republic Party is going to be coming over to the side of the people soon. Even though it seemed for awhile that that party of war and deficit spending, and, oh yes, the end of the constitution and all the functions of a good government, was thinking votes could be endlessly bought to keep them in power, the election of last November has opened a few eyes. Not at the top, but in the ranks.

While I would lots rather see the Republics out of office en masse, it's unrealistic to think that they will continue charging blindly into oblivion. Inevitably, even the reporters at the Detroit Free Press are hearing and maybe even seeing that.

The Iraq war will start winding down when disillusioned Republicans in Congress confront President George W. Bush to say he has lost their support, U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview Monday.

Levin, one of a handful of Democrats shaping his party's Iraq exit strategy, compared what will be required of Republican leaders to what the party's congressional members did in the final days of Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974, when they made clear he had squandered their support in the Watergate scandal.

Levin said he expects that will happen, but he wouldn't say when. But recent events suggest there may be cracks in the GOP's solidarity with Bush.

Some Republicans have said this week that they want to see results from the administration's war policy in September.

White House press secretary Tony Snow cautioned Tuesday that people should "avoid the idea that Iraq is like Oz, and one day, it's going to be black and white, and the next day, you're going to wake up and it's color."

But Levin said that "at some point, some Republican leaders will walk into the Oval Office the way they did with Nixon and say, 'Hey, you're losing your Republican troops in the Congress, and you got to change course. You got to start removing troops instead of surging troops.' "

He also said his party's strategy has succeeded in putting Iraqi leaders on notice that Congress' patience is wearing thin.

"We keep building up momentum," Levin said of the Democratic strategy, despite Bush's veto of a war-funding bill that included timetables for troop withdrawal and the House's failure to override the veto last week.

It has to be pretty scary to be a member of the cretin in chief's party and see him once again refusing to take Yes for an answer, announcing that getting full funding in the next bill to come his way, he will veto it, too. Selling the troops out for personal political aims doesn't make a good platform for his buds who will have to run for office again.