Exit Strategy in Search of a Party - WaPo

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201356.html

George W. Bush has precious little to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, and nothing whatever when it comes to his adversaries. Beset at every turn, the president and his men have been pining for some patsies, some loudmouth liberals, some effete elitists whom they can demonize in the best traditions of the party of Richard Nixon.

Instead, look who's come after them in the past half-year: Cindy Sheehan, whose down-the-line dovishness is more than offset by her standing as the mother of a soldier killed in Bush's war; Patrick Fitzgerald, the straight-arrow boy prosecutor out of New York's Irish working class; and now John Murtha, the toughest and most decorated Marine in the House, who represents a Pennsylvania district straight out of "The Deer Hunter."...

...But if the Democrats' silence is driving Rove batty, it's making their own supporters a little crazed as well. The Democratic base clearly supports withdrawing the troops; in Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, that position probably commands nearly unanimous support. Meanwhile, the case for continuing our involvement grows increasingly absurd: In its latest iteration, we are there to prevent war between Shiite and Sunni, which looms, of course, only because we invaded Iraq in the first place. We stay to mitigate the consequence of our coming. We've had wars in which our soldiers died for better causes than that.

...But it's not 1969. There is no silent majority to be rallied in support of the war, just a frustrated minority. The streets are quiet. Demonstrators are decorous. The audience for Dick Cheney's hatchet jobs has dwindled. The president's credibility is reaching Nixonian depths. The Democrats have been pushed to the brink of opposing the war, but there -- on the brink -- they totter.

And so, on the most urgent question confronting America today, we have reached an absurd and exquisite equipoise. The Republicans cannot credibly defend the war; the Democrats cannot quite bring themselves to call for its end. And the war goes on...

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