OK, Reid didn't put it quite that way, but it's hard to believe anything else when Reid says he won't believe General Petraeus if he tells Congress there's progress being made in Iraq.
What can we say? Reid needs a defeat in Iraq, just as all the Democrats do. As Rush says all the time, they are invested in defeat. Can we call them traitors yet?
Allahpundit at Hot Air has analysis and the video.
He’s willing to compromise. Unlike some Democrats, he’ll hear Petraeus out; he’ll just simply refuse to believe anything he says that doesn’t fit the left’s narrative. If that “reasoning” sounds familiar, that’s because it’s exactly what Eric Boehlert and various nutroots morons accused the right of doing during the Jamil Hussein episode. Allegedly we couldn’t accept that conditions in Iraq were dire so we concocted a sourcing scandal to explain away a dubious AP report about Shiites lighting Sunnis on fire, which, once discredited, would call into question the totality of reporting from the country. Sheer, unadulterated horseshinola, but that’s What Warbloggers Believe according to non-warbloggers Boehlert et al. Now here’s the Senate majority leader doing precisely the opposite, willfully turning a blind eye to any signs of progress, however “modest,” to protect his own quasi-religious conviction that nothing but nothing good has ever come from the war and nothing ever will. Wouldn’t be the first time the left has done that, either.
I included a bit at the beginning of the clip to show how absurd are the Clintonian semantics he’s resorted to in order to spin his recent declaration of defeat. Petraeus doesn’t believe, as Reid apparently does, that “the war is lost”; he believes that military force alone can’t win it at this point. Reid says he doesn’t grasp the distinction, but of course he does — he’s just worried about losing some of those extra Senate seats he expects to pick up from an American defeat. All other consequences be damned.
I'm not sure how rats like Reid sleep at night.
UPDATE: Confederate Yankee points out that it would be difficult for Democrats to know about how we are doing in Iraq since they skip the briefings.
The New York Post says Reid should "put a cork in it. Today." Gotta agree there.
Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom points out that Reid's loudmouth behavior is based on politics, not principle.
I’ve written it a thousand times, but it bears repeating: it’s not that Democrats like Reid are enamored over “losing.” Instead, it’s that they think of “winning” as a partisan exercise, with power as its own reward.
Similarly, any political angle that can weaken the US military, prevent a muscular foreign policy, and erode bourgeois concepts such as sovereignty and self-determination, will aid in the transformation of the US into a member nation of a global nanny government—a welcomed change, for the perpetually guilt-ridden, from its current status as hegemonic hyperpower. And—to riff off a well-known bromide—when all you have is paper, the whole world begins to look like a treaty.
It is telling that Reid’s fellow Democrats are reacting quickly to his gaffe, not because they don’t wish to see us lose the war— after all, many of them have staked their political future on just that—but rather, because they desperately don’t want to be seen as wishing us to lose. So they are forced to straddle the issue, agitating for legislation that will hamstring the military, offering propaganda victories to our enemies, and providing constant “dissent” that weakens troop morale and emboldens terrorism by giving the impression that the tactic is useful should its practitioners hope to divide a population—all while pretending to care about the troops and wring their hands over the possibility of a loss that they are working actively to help bring about.
Reid’s sin, from the Democratic Party’s perspective, is that he gave voice to the very kind of surrender rhetoric that has long cost Democrats the trust of the American people on issues of national security. Or, to put it another way, Reid’s blunder was one of candor—when what the Democratic party is about these days is keeping up appearances.
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