Utter Confusion on the Editorial Page

I haven't had much time to sit at the computer today, as Don from Article 19 is in town, and we just finished up a little bar hopping.

Speaking of bar hopping, I can only guess that that's what the editors of The Washington Post had been doing right before writing Saturday's editorial. Everybody's already been talking about this, (Atrios has a full linkfest), but this is too ripe a target to pass up. It turns out that the only thing standing between Congress, the Prez, and a compromise to start getting the troops out of Iraq is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The Senate Democratic leadership spent the past week trying to prove that Congress is deeply divided over Iraq, with Democrats pressing and Republicans resisting a change of course. In fact that's far from the truth. A large majority of senators from both parties favor a shift in the U.S. mission that would involve substantially reducing the number of American forces over the next year or so and rededicating those remaining to training the Iraqi army, protecting Iraq's borders and fighting al-Qaeda. President Bush and his senior aides and generals also support this broad strategy, which was formulated by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission. Mr. Bush recently said that "it's a position I'd like to see us in."

If only we had a Republican majority in the Senate. If that were the case, we might not even be in Iraq in the first place. . . . Wait a minute, didn't we already try that? The truth is that for whatever reason some Republican senators are willing to give lip service to getting out of Iraq, most of them have yet to back it up with an actual vote to get out of Iraq. They had a chance to do so this week, but instead they chose to support the Republican filibuster, preventing the measure to start withdrawing troops from getting a chance at an up-or-down vote. All Reid did was to end consideration of alternate proposals that would have allowed the Republicans to appear concerned without ultimately changing the situation for the troops on the ground (Greg Sargent at TPM Cafe takes apart one such proposal).

I'm not sure what kind of stupor the writer of this editorial was in, but after listing a variety of unresolved issues on Iraq that must be ironed out before any sort of troop drawdown can take place, the Post editorialist continues, "There's no guarantee that Mr. Bush can agree with Congress on those points or that he will make the effort to do so," as if he hadn't stated just a few lines above that the Prez had already in agreement with everybody but Reid. If we're not even sure the Prez is going to bother to try to reach a compromise, how can we label Harry Reid as being the only thing standing in the way of a current deal? All I can hope is that after taking six or seven minutes to pen this nonsensical piece of opinion writing, the author was able to get back to his pub crawl.