One thing that's lost in the heated discussion of "it's been over a month since they were sworn in so why haven't they brought the troops home yet?" is that the Democrats, though they technically control the Senate, are not in the majority there -- and won't be for some time, unless a couple of Republicans get hit by trucks sometime in the next couple of years.
It's not just that Lieberman isn't a Democrat. Or that people like Ben Nelson can't be trusted to vote the way Democrats should. We're also down a Senator -- Tim Johnson -- for health reasons, and as he's currently recuperating in an undisclosed location, he's not available to cast votes and won't be for weeks if not months.
I know we all love to bash first and ask questions later. (And a lot of people are so reflexively cynical -- driven that way by events -- that they deploy the cynicism when it may not be warranted. And there are some who are cynical because it's cooler to sit around and grumble in clever terms about a situation, than to dig in for the long haul and work in effective ways to change it.) But maybe, just maybe, we could not just automatically assume the worst of people for a change?