Countdown to Failure

Senator Clinton announced on Saturday that President Bush must begin to "redeploy" U.S. troops in Iraq within 90 days, or risk Congress revoking authorization for the war.

It doesn't take a magic decoder ring to figure out the message being sent to the bad guys in all of this. Hang on a little bit longer, and we'll be ready to give up and get out of your way. Bizarre that the way the Dems decide to get tough is to push around a battered new ally. The Iraqi government must step up... or else. What was the last tough message sent to anyone who was actually a threat to our our troops?

Clinton, of course, is in a rough spot. She is a veteran of presidential politics, and knows what it will take to win the general election, and that cut-and-run won't cut it. Of course, the dingbats in her own party are forcing her to impossibly triangulate in order to appease the rabid anti-war left.

But the Dems seem quite willing to cut off their own nose to spite their face. Bob Shrum's assessment speaks volumes about the state of the party. Shrum has yet to find a campaign he couldn't torpedo, so his advice is insightful for the rest of us:

For the life of me I don’t understand why she can’t say, ‘I made a mistake, I was misled, the country was misled, the intelligence was manipulated,’ ” said Robert M. Shrum, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry in 2004. “I think there’s this tremendous desire in her campaign not to get into a position where you’re identified with traditional Democratic views. But this is now a party that is strongly antiwar, and is desperate for change on big issues like Iraq and health care.

Regardless of what the Democratic Party wants, this country does not want defeat. With Clinton's impossible 90-day timetable and John Murtha's "slow bleed" strategy of cutting off funding to the troops, it will soon become apparent to Americans that whatever the Democrats are selling, even they don't believe it will result in victory.