Will the GOP crack? And if so, when? Charles Babington writes for the Associated Press:

Republicans in Congress are increasingly worried that their stalwart support of President Bush’s Iraq war policy may cost them dearly in next year’s elections. Should their solidarity crack, it could boost Democrats’ efforts to start troop withdrawals.

GOP lawmakers have marched in virtual lockstep with Bush so far, supporting his troop increase, an open-ended war commitment and other policies that have grown increasingly unpopular. Privately, some express fears that their loyalty might lead them over a political cliff in 2008, when they hope to reclaim the House and Senate majorities they lost last year.

For now, there’s little overt evidence of such wavering, and many Republicans say it’s too late to uncouple their party’s near-term fate from the war’s outcome. When the House voted May 2 to sustain Bush’s veto of a bill that would have imposed redeployment deadlines, only two of the chamber’s 201 Republicans abandoned the president.

Still, Rep. Jack Kingston, a reliable Bush supporter from Georgia, said that vote “could have been the peak, possibly the last statement of House public solidarity with the White House. As the war develops in the next two crucial months, the political solidarity may change.”

A question increasingly asked in the Capitol is: how big a price might the party pay if the war continues to claim U.S. casualties without quelling the anti-American insurgency?

The time is coming when Republicans in Congress must decide: Stand firm with the Bush Administration, or abandon ship? Senators who don’t face re-election next year perhaps can remain noncommittal, but the 20 or so who must begin campaigning for their seats soon don’t have that luxury.

Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, one of two Senate Republicans to support the latest spending bill for the conflict, said the war “is a problem because it’s defining our party to the American people, and the American people have lost faith in this cause.”

“Many Republican colleagues are simply waiting until September,” he said, citing the deadline Bush gave to Army Gen. David Petraeus for a progress report on the war. Unless there is a dramatic turnabout by then, Smith said, the party’s near-unanimity is almost certain to fracture.

Conventional wisdom is often wrong, of course, but the CW for some time has been that if matters in Iraq have not substantially improved by August or so, the scramble for the lifeboats will begin.

Of course, most of these same politicians will have to walk a fine line between the anti-Iraq War general public and the rabidly hawkish right-wing base. They’ll try to keep one foot on the deck and one in the lifeboat. Can we say “self-destruct,” children?

Jim Tankersley writes in the Chicago Tribune that Democrats also are looking to September.

President Bush appears poised to win months more of funding for troops in Iraq. But if conditions don’t improve there by fall, he could lose support from a battalion of congressional Republicans.

Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, while still debating details, say they are likely to pass a bill that would tie war spending to a set of benchmarks for Iraq’s progress but no deadlines for troop withdrawal, which caused Bush to veto a funding bill this week. They would then address the war in other debates this summer and let political pressure mount on the GOP.

“This is going to be a step-by-step process, continuing to isolate” the president, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the House Democratic Caucus chairman. “The key to that is to basically get Republicans who say, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore.’ “

Yeah, I know, it’s Rahm Emanuel. But bear with me here.

Privately and publicly, some House Republicans and their staff say defections could come as early as September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American troops in Iraq, returns to brief Congress on the progress of Bush’s “troop surge” of nearly 30,000 to quell insurgent fighters.

Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said the briefing will be a different sort of “benchmark” for a Republican caucus that has so far stood nearly united behind the president against troop withdrawals.

“That [unity] will change very abruptly and very quickly in September if the report is not good,” he said. “People are going to be looking at their next election. Their next election will be right around the corner, and the war will be the big issue.”

I think that were it not for the “surge,” many more Republicans would have bailed out by now. I say again, the whole point of the “surge” was not to turn around the war in Iraq but to buy Bush more time. He’s trying to run out the clock. Of course, I fully except him to emerge from his August vacation with some other “great leap forward” scheme to present to Congress.

Despite protests from such anti-war groups as MoveOn.org, which is pushing for a “concrete” deadline for ending the war in the next funding bill, Democratic leaders including Emanuel and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) say they don’t have the votes to override a Bush veto and they don’t want to risk cutting off funding for troops in the field.

Faced with the prospect of losing anti-war Democrats in the Senate, who will not support a bill without a withdrawal timeline, Durbin said the only choice is to work with Republicans on a compromise.

Analysts say that could help Democrats in purely political terms. A compromise allows Democrats to keep criticizing the war without taking “ownership” of it from Bush, and without opening themselves to Vietnam-style accusations of undermining a war before it had a chance to succeed, said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution who supports the deployment of the extra troops.

“There’s a political person who says, you’re better to wait until September to have your big fight,” O’Hanlon said. “Because that way, you’ll have given the surge a chance.”

For now, Dem Seator Dick Durbin says he thinks Congress “put something on the president’s desk that either he accepts through negotiations or cannot afford to veto.” However, I have serious doubts if Bush will compromise at all. As this Reuters article by Matt Spetalnick says, he sees his own inflexibility as his chief virtue.

What it means in practical terms, however, is no end in sight to political gridlock in Washington. The president’s veto on Tuesday of legislation that would have imposed a timetable for US troop withdrawal from Iraq could be the first of many legislative standoffs to come in his final 21 months in office. “George W Bush is of a mind-set that says, ‘You’re not going to tell us what to do,'” said Shirley Anne Warshaw, a presidential scholar at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. “The ‘decider’ still hasn’t learned to be the compromiser.”

And compromise isn’t going to get any easier. Facing a Democratic-led Congress challenging his conduct of the war and using its broad authority to investigate his administration, Bush is digging in his heels even harder as he fights to stave off lame-duck status. He is also defying calls to dump Attorney General Alberto Gonzales over the botched firing of federal prosecutors, and to withdraw support for Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect now embroiled in scandal as president of the World Bank.

In defending his loyalists, Bush is signaling how far he is willing to go to avoid the message of weakness that their forced departure might send, analysts say. Adding to Bush’s pressures, a new book by former CIA chief George Tenet accuses administration officials of going to war in Iraq without “serious debate” on whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. The White House denies the charge.

But Bush seems to take pride in shrugging off such problems. Barred by law from seeking a third term, he also appears more than willing to buck public opinion. He comes across as almost unshakable is his belief that history will vindicate him for an increasingly unpopular war that has driven his approval ratings down into the mid-30 percent range and eroded US credibility at home and abroad.

This paragraph in particular interested me:

Still, some analysts say Bush is not as inflexible as he might seem and that his second-term woes have been magnified by Iraq, the overarching issue of his presidency. He has, for example, softened over time on immigration reform and domestic spying and recently turned more pragmatic in dealing with North Korea, a country he once shunned as a charter member of what he had branded the “axis of evil.” “Is he stubborn? Certainly. Is he resolute? Yes,” said Stephen Hess, a political scientist at George Washington University. “But Iraq makes everything look worse than it is.”

I’m willing to bet that the only reason Bush “softened” on North Korea is that he chose to become disengaged and allow the State Department to handle it without his input. I say this because that’s one way a psychopath deals with something he can’t bully or control — he shoves it out of his mind. In the first several months of his first term Bush was visibly outspoken on all matters Korean. Now, even though news stories about the North Korean situation attribute policy changes to Bush, if you read them carefully you really don’t see Bush at all. You see the State Department, you see diplomats; Bush is so far behind the scenes he’s invisible.

In related news — take a look at who’s chosing to spend more time with his family. Peter Baker writes for the Washington Post:

Deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch II, who helped spearhead the recent policy review that led President Bush to send more U.S. troops to Iraq, announced yesterday that he will step down early next month, becoming the latest key aide to depart the White House at a critical juncture.

Crouch, the No. 2 official at the National Security Council, has been a pivotal figure on a series of difficult issues, including Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and the detention policy for terrorism suspects. And it was his interagency group meeting at the White House complex for many weeks last winter that resulted in the ongoing troop buildup in Iraq, which has become the defining decision of the year for Bush.

In an interview, Crouch said he is leaving to devote more time to his family after six years in the administration.

He really said that. Wow.

Peter Baker writes that “Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, also plans to resign soon.” Interesting.

They can’t help themselves. It’s a syndrome. For that matter, what is it with righties and reality?

On a lighter note — the Saturday Cartoons.

Update: Here’s a little more on righties and hate — Dave Neiwert has been writing about the “new racism,” which is pretty much the “old racism” dressed up to look like social commentary. Yesterday he noted that CBS News has been forced to turn off comments on Barack Obama stories on its web site because the stories were attracting too many racist comments. Dave comments:

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing “political correctness,” or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call “race realism.”

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner … well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

Awhile back some guy at BBC radio asked me if America was ready to elect a black president. I said I didn’t know. I’d like to think we are, but I could be mistaken. On the other hand, I suspect the majority of die-hard white supremacists vote Republican, anyway, meaning that if Senator Obama is the nominee his race wouldn’t cost him many votes.

And Dave is probably right about the zombies. If Senator Obama is the nominee, I expect to see a return of the overt, full-frontal racism that was mostly banished from mass media in the 1960s. Not that racist hate speech ever went away, of course. But the prime-time bigots figured out how to cloak racist hate speech as “humor” or as “unbiased commentary,” often accompanied by much winking and nudging. If in the fall of 2008 presidential nominee Obama is cruising to an apparent victory, I ‘spect a whole lot o’ desperate bigots will drop the pretense and say, plainly, what they really mean. It could get ugly.

Update 2: On righties and Darwin:

… it’s always heartening to hear conservatives returning with childlike wonder to the great intellectual debates of the 1880s. …

… As for Darwin’s later work on vegetable molds and climbing plants, though, I think there are many relevant lessons there for anyone seeking to understand the rise of the New Right.

Too droll.

Surely, somewhere, someone has compiled all the changing reasons for the War in Iraq. By that I mean how it started out to be about an imminent threat to the U.S. — smoking guns, mushroom clouds — that was not imminent; then about finding weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there; then about establishing a democratic government; then about training enough Iraqis to maintain their own civil order. And now the goal has devolved to just reducing violence to an “acceptable level” so that we can declare victory and leave.

As Jeff Feldman says, the acceptable level of violence in for most Americans is zero.

Jeff quotes a bit of an interview of Bush by Charley Rose, which I believe is the same stuff to be heard in the video I posted yesterday.

GWB: I mean, there is an acceptable level of violence in certain societies around the world, and the question is, you know, what is that level? And that’s where the experts come in.

They’ve got experts for deciding what levels of violence are acceptable?

I — you know, you and I can’t determine that sitting here in New York, but we can — we can ask people’s advice upon that; David Petraeus would have an option on that. Ryan Crocker, our ambassador in Iraq.

Notice it doesn’t occur to him to ask an Iraqi.

But it’s a very interesting way of putting the question, and — because all — there is an acceptable level of violence in all societies, even our own.

CR: And where do you —

GWB: Even though all violence is to be abhorred, nevertheless, there is — you know, there’s certain violence — levels of violence that people say, “Well gosh, I can go about my life, I’ve got [unintelligible]”

In other words, reduce the level of violence until it’s just a nuisance.

I keep thinking of what John Kerry said in 2004 about terrorism becoming a nuisance. Here’s a snip:

In the interview published on Sunday, Kerry told New York Times reporter Matt Bai, “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise — it isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.

The wingnuts went absolutely ballistic over this. I think Kerry should have thought this out a bit more carefully before he said it. It’s one thing to go on about your life knowing that there’s illegal gambling going on somewhere, and quite another to live with a threat of suicide bombers. Certainly the possibility of terrorism can never be reduced to zero, and maybe Kerry was trying to say that the goal is to make terrorism a remote enough possibility that we aren’t constantly worried about it. I can’t imagine it ever being just a nuisance, however.

But here’s Bush thinking there’s some level of violence to which people can adjust. “Well gosh, I can go about my life, I’ve got [unintelligible],” in spite of there being corpses in the street. There may be a point at which people become numb to violence, but adjusting? I don’t think so.

The Bush-Rose interview continues,

GWB: Well — and by the way, if the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory. In other words, if you say, you know, “I’m going to judge the administration’s plan based upon whether they were able to have no car bombings in Baghdad,” we will have just given — because car bombings are hard to stop — or suicide bombings — very hard to stop. We have just given al-Qaeda or any other extremist a significant victory.

Huh?

And that’s one of the problems I face in trying to convince the American people, one, this is doable — in other words, I wouldn’t have our troops there if I didn’t think this is, one, important, and secondly, achievable. But I also understand on their TV screens, people are seeing horrific bombings, and they’re saying to themselves, “Is this possible? Can we possibly succeed in the face of this kind of violence?” And that’s where this enemy — the enemy of moderation has got a — you know, they’ve got a — they’ve got a powerful tool in [unintelligible]

Actually, I’m not seeing horrific bombings on my TV screen. Compared to what part of the Vietnam War we used to be able to watch on the nightly news, Iraq is nearly invisible. We hear about it more than we see it.

Along these lines, Eugene Robinson has a great op ed in today’s Washington Post called “Lost in the Fog With Commander Guy.”

In Tipp City, just before his reminder about the Oval Office rug, Bush said success in Iraq would be defined as “a country that is stable enough for the government to work, that can defend itself and serve as an ally in this war on terror, that won’t be a safe haven, that will deny the extremists and the radicals.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to bloody suicide bombings, he added. “Think about that: If our definition is no more suiciders, you’ve just basically said to the suiciders, go ahead.”

Yeah, think about that.

Speaking to the contractors’ group Wednesday, the president elaborated: “Either we’ll succeed or we won’t succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.”

What is the man talking about? What “parts of our own country” experience violence remotely comparable to that in Iraq? Is he serious?

Sheltered and delusional would be a better guess.

This is from The Politico, so take with a grain of salt, but I like it —

Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.) outlined a new plan for an Iraq funding bill in private meetings Thursday afternoon, congressional aides said.

The plan would split the now vetoed supplemental spending bill into two bills, one that would provide two months of funding for the Iraq War and another that would fund the agricultural programs contained in the earlier bill, aides said.

In addition to the two months of Iraq funding, the bill would provide a $10 billion cushion to allow the military flexibility. It would also require the president to report back to Congress by July 13 on the extent to which the Iraqi government had met certain benchmarks for progress.

The plan would “fence off” additional combat funds until Congress voted to “unfence” them. Such a vote would be held on July 24. A vote of the FY08 defense appropriations bill would be delayed until September, one aide said.

Benchmarks with real teeth. Interesting.

As I argued here, I think the smartest strategy right now could be to hit Bush with a bill that’s got real conditions in it, even if not timetables, that can attract a substantial number of Republican votes. A veto-proof majority would be ideal. Force Bush into a real confrontation with Congress, not just Democrats in Congress. Commander Guy would either be brought to heel, or else Congress would be forced to acknowledge and deal with the constitutional crisis they’ve been ignoring for some time.

Update: This guy’s got it:

One thing I like about these Democratic leaders is they’re very subtle and canny. We have to keep in mind, of course, that we’re dealing with a hostage situation here, and we have to protect our soldiers from this maniac.

Exactly. I see lots of bloggers think — naively, IMO — that a cutoff of funds would force Bush to withdraw troops. I have already explained why I think this is a foolish idea. Bush can move monies around for months to keep the war going, and if he’s as crazy as I think he is he’d see every U.S. soldier in Iraq starved or gunned down before he’d comply with a congressional mandate to bring them home. We’re dealing with a hostage situation here, and we have to protect our soldiers from this maniac.

TPMtv: May 3, 2007

I’d settle for an acceptable level of competence.

By popular demand —

“He’s Commander Guy!”

(To the tune of “Secret Agent Man”)

There’s a man who lives inside a bubble.
The Secret Service shields him from all trouble.
He’s got more power than you; ain’t nothin’ you can do.
The nation may not last until tomorrow.

He’s Commander Guy! He’s Commander Guy!
It’s his way or the highway or he’ll know the reason why!

Beware of smirking faces that you find
A smirking face can hide an evil mind
Be careful what you say
Or they’ll haul your ass away;
You’ll find yourself in Gitmo by tomorrow.

He’s Commander Guy! He’s Commander Guy!
It’s his way or the highway or he’ll know the reason why!

Update: Here’s a graphic.

Update 2: He’s also Veto Man.

Now he’s “the Commander Guy.”

Update: The Young Turks have the audio.