You don't play chicken with a sadistic sociopath.

While I share the chagrin and perhaps the outrage at the feckless seeming of the Democratic leadership, I feel that living to fight another day better serves the interests of progressives.

The sad fact of the matter is that Bush would leave the troops over there to die without any money. He would not begin to remove them even while knowing that their funding had run out. And it would be irresponsible to knowingly leave the troops unfunded at the hands of a delusional Commander-in-Chief.

Another sad fact is that we could not count on enough Republican votes to force our timetable and benchmarks and standards through. That fact says more about the President, and his Republican allies, than it does about the Democrats. In fact, the only thing it says about Democrats is that we need more of them!

Yes the leadership kicked the can down the road. That is disappointing.

But it is the wisest move politically and it prevents the GOP from foisting responsibility for this policy off on its opponents. By September it would be hard to imagine that what sits in the mind of the American people will be the fact that Democrats lost this battle. The reality is that they are powerless to stop the President because of his allies in Congress.

It is not the fault of Democrats that our Constitutional system has limits.

Were it not that Bush and the Republicans are so divorced from reality, are so craven, are so stubborn that they insist on pursuing neither a policy for victory nor a strategy that enables our exit, we would have the votes to implement a timetable and a shift in focus toward the political reconciliation that must take place to make any military effort lasting.