Here's a little Tuesday night poll for your pleasure.
As the Washington Post and Keith Olbermann and DKos Contributing Editor Kagro X have all noted today, more and more Republicans - some grumbling quietly for a year or so about Mister Bush's handling of "the situation" in Iraq - have recently gotten a tad louder. They've joined the timetable bandwagon.
September.
If the escalation ain't cutting it by then, says Roy Blunt, Arlen Specter, Gordon Smith, John Boehner, Susan Collins and others, then something has gotta change.
Forget what you previously heard that timetables undermine the troops, give a terrible advantage to the insurgents, and amount to a craven surrender in the Global War on Terror™. Those are Democratic timetables. What we have here are Republican timetables, which are patriotic, strategic and a wise conservation of U.S. military resources. This isn't "cut and run," no sirree. This is letting the Iraqis work things out for themselves.
Over the years, I've read a handful of Diaries and comments here at Daily Kos. So I know that a few of you probably think these Republicans (and some Democrats, too) are bullshitting. That if the election were 14 months from today, instead of 14 months from September, they'd be saying May should be the timetable month. A couple of you will even go so far as to say that it's all a scam, just a way to get Bush closer to the magic date 19 months from now when he can hand the whole mess over to a Democratic President.
Having always been extremely interested in Daily Kos demographics, let me ask you: How forgiving are you willing to be? What's your timetable on Republicans coming down the rat-lines off the USS Bush?
I'm not talking about the practical side of things, the we'll-take-your-votes-if-it-leads-to-a-veto-proof-majority pragmatism.
What I'm asking is: If a Republican (or Democrat) finally comes around in September and says the U.S. needs a timetable for withdrawal, does that wash away for you what will by then have been that person's five-and-a-half-years of parroting the Administration's war hype, backing the war and the occupation and downplaying all the rottenness, from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, from Anbar Province to the Walter Reed Annex, from the secret prisons of Thailand to the secret machinations of the Defense Policy Board?
Will you, in the deep recesses of your tolerant liberal heart forgive them and count them on "our side" if they come around in, say, January 2008, before the primaries? June? September? What's your timetable?
Take the poll.