What's That Scent?

Blowback.


mmmm, What a sweet aroma it is.

Last year, following the bombing of the al-Askirya Mosque in Samarra and the wave of sectarian bloodshed that followed, it became hip to be anti-war. The left hitched their wagon to that mule and rode it right into razor thin majorities in the House and Senate. Upon taking office, the first words out of their mouths were: "This war is lost."

With party leadership buttoned securely in the pocket of the moonbat bloggers, Democrats mounted a furiously futile assault on President Bush's Iraq policy, scheduling vote after useless vote on non-binding resolutions and unconstitutional appropriations bills. Centrist Democrats, not eager to anger the voters that the left duped into electing them, kinda sorta went along. President Bush held his ground, gleefully vetoed the unconstitutional incarnation of H.R. 2206, and forced the Democrats to cave.

Undaunted by their defeat, Democrats vowed to return in the fall with a renewed vigor to force troop withdrawals and ultimately end the conflict in Iraq as a defeat they could hang on Bush. That defeat, as their grand scheme called for, would then be used to consolidate gains in Congress and sweep a Democrat into the White House in 2008.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that defeat. The Armed Forces of the United States maintained a momentum in Iraq and made undeniably good progress in the security situation in Iraq. More importantly, the heightened security in Baghdad and other major population centers began ushering in another key process: Political reconciliation between the basic units of Arab culture and society: The Tribe.

About three weeks from now, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker will testify before Congress, providing answers and comments on their input to the much anticipated progress report due from the administration. Democrats, especially centrist Democrats in swing districts and swing states, are petrified. The administration's report will show progress. The story of that progress will go in one moonbat ear and right out of the other. The hardline liberals don't care what the report says and won't be affected by anything short of a Sunni-Shi'a-Kurd Peace Treaty and the end of all hostilities. But the centrists, the ones with conservative voters watching carefully from home, do care.

The report threatens to rip party unity right down an ideological line, in what Penn State University's Matthew Woessner called a "Nightmare Scenario" for Democrats. "A nightmare scenario for any party is when the pressure, the sum total of the pressures from their constituency groups, are out of step with mainstream America. That's a prescription for electoral disaster," Woessner told Reuters in an interview yesterday. "The explosion of the success of the left-wing blogosphere has placed the Democrats under even more pressure from their left," he continued.

"The Democrats can't control the House and the Senate unless they elect centrists. And they can't elect their centrists by having a totally liberal agenda."

Ahh, blowback. There's that scent again.