They're Back, Like They Never Left

Senate Majority Chisler "Dirty Harry" Reid is still an insufferable boob:

After a Robert Byrd-esque ode to the desert thunderstorm, he said he went all around his state, and his people complained to him about the high cost of energy (more government needed to regulate and tax oil companies and Halliburton), about the damaging effects of burning fuels on environment (more regulation and taxes on oil companies to stop global warming), about needing more affordable health care (more taxes and government to pay for Hillarycare II, coming soon if the polls are right in November, '08) about tuitions being too high (more government programs needed, paid for by ending tax cuts), and ending the war (cutting and running to appease their fringe base). So in other words, his "people" are telling him exactly the same things he said he would tackle when the Democrats took over the Senate eight months ago. So if Nevadans are still calling for the same things that Reid and the Democrats were touting as agenda items at the beginning of the year, that tells me they've failed on those five benchmarks.

One would think if Nevadans were really all nothing but brainwashed left-wing drones, they might have been more than a little peeved at Reid's failure to deliver on all these Big Government schemes. Indeed, they might have been expected to ask him how he and his majority are going to "change direction" in order to attain them, and even toss in some pointed (and patently delusional) suggestions. Instead, Reid just reiterated the same stale "good intentions," which, with his track record in this Congress, ought to be cold comfort for his "supporters" back home.

Ironic that he continues to droningly insist that the White House "change direction in Iraq," despite the fact that that is precisely what they did with the "Surge," with unanimous Donk support, back in January, and it has produced dramatic results that Reid is already telegraphing he's going to ignore, his assurances of "keeping an open mind" about the Petraeus report not withstanding.

Chucky Schumer, meanwhile, isn't bothering with such phony pretenses. In fact, he's issued his own interim "Surge" report:

And let me be clear, the violence in Anbar has gone down despite the surge, not because of the surge. The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes from al Qaeda said to these tribes we have to fight al Qaeda ourselves. It wasn't that the surge brought peace here. It was that the warlords took peace here, created a temporary peace here. And that is because there was no one else there protecting.

Hmmm. I thought the violence hadn't gone down and General Petraeus was a liar who was making it all up about the success of the "Surge" on direct orders from the White House. That's what Dirty Harry and his deputy, Ali Dickbar al-Durbini, are saying. I thought the Sunni tribes were still fighting us. I thought there wasn't any "al Qaeda in Iraq". I thought American forces were "breeding" terrorists faster than they could defeat them.

Well, at least Chucky "remembered" that the American military is a bunch of bumbling incompetents that couldn't storm a Justin Timberlake concert. That would "explain" why our "boys & girls" had to be "bailed out" by "the warlords."

Of course that would probably be news to General Petraeus himself:

But the detention, or the capture or killing of the number of leaders that we have taken out in recent months, and weeks, actually, and the progress in terms of just clearing areas of them…as you know, Anbar Province has really become quite relatively clear of al Qaeda. Eastern Anbar still has some, and we are working in that area. We have recently cleared Western Baquba, which was almost al Qaeda central, the capitol of the new caliphate that they have tried to establish here in Iraq. So there has been considerable progress against them...

And his deputy, Major-General James Simmons:

Well, the operation that you’re talking about that I mentioned the other day was Operation Lightning Hammer which was conducted by MND-North [Multi-National Division-North], which is headquartered out of Hawaii, the 25th Infantry Division commanded by Major General Randy Mixon. They conducted a twelve-day, large scale operation in Diyala to disrupt al Qaeda and other terrorist elements that are operating in the Diyala River Valley. And the operation went into the process of clearing about fifty villages and palm groves. It was a very successful operation, resulted in twenty-six al Qaeda members being killed, and thirty-seven of them detained, ten very large weapons caches were taken down in the process of this operation that went on there north and east of Baqubah.

Adjectives such as "risible," "slanderous," and "vile" have peppered Chucky's "interim report" from the starboard side of the blogosphere. Rest assured they are all spot-on target, but to my mind come descriptors like "silly," "childish," and "pathetic." This is what the Democrats have been reduced to:

1) They voted for the Surge and unanimously confirmed General Petraeus as theatre commander in Iraq, evidently in the certitudinous belief that he would inevitably fail, and the enhanced cost in blood and treasure on top of the "war-weariness" that Americans already felt would propel their party to a blowout victory in November 2008.

2) Then they spent almost four months trying, unsuccessfully, to defund it without being seen as defunding it.

3) They spent every single day since January insisting that "the war is lost" and "the Surge [that they themselves voted for] is a failure," most of it long before the additional 30,000 troops were even deployed.

4) Now the worst possible outcome has transpired: the Surge has succeeded in routing al Qaeda, intimidating the Shiite radicals personified by Muqtada al-Sadr, and laying the groundwork for dramatic political progress by the regime of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Donk congressman are having to admit it, the New York Times threw in the towel six weeks ago, and President Bush made the ultimate "putting his life where his mouth is" gesture by going to Anbar province himself.

The anti-war crowd's credibility is in tatters. Everything they said was untrue, everything they said would happen has not, everything they said couldn't and wouldn't happen has. They were and are utterly, totally, comprehensively, and completely 100% WRONG, and their collective personal antichrist, George W. Bush, was RIGHT. And they made complete assholes of themselves in the process.

Do they admit they were wrong and publicly apologize for their serial, despicable seditions? No. Do they at least have the sense to shut up and quit digging themselves into an even deeper PR grave? No. Can they continue to pretend that the Surge "failed"? No.

This, then, is all they have left: slandering General Petraeus as a "Bush windup toy" and putting over the ludicrous claim that all this dramatic progress in Iraq somehow just happened by itself, and that the Coalition, NOT al Qaeda and NOT the Iranians, were the biggest obstacle to it.

My thirteen-year-old son doesn't make excuses this lame or live in a fantasy world this deep. How the Dems can actually believe that they will benefit politically from this bellyflop into the deep end of sheer puerility, to say nothing of frontally attacking an institution in the military that is still popular with the American public, is baffling.

I think General Petraeus' congressional testimony next week will bring a Joseph Welch-like moment. God willing, some Republican will have the grapefruits to echo those timeless words to his "colleagues" across the aisle, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

It will, of course, be a rhetorical question.