I have been waiting for this counter attack.
Bob Herbert obliges:
The administration and its allies have been mercilessly bashing Democrats who argued that the U.S. should begin developing a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces. Republicans stood up on the Senate floor last week, one after another, to chant like cultists from the Karl Rove playbook: We're tough. You're not. Cut-and-run. Nyah-nyah-nyah!
But then on Sunday we learned that the president's own point man in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, had fashioned the very thing that ol' blood-and-guts Frist and his C-Span brigade had ranted against: a withdrawal plan.
Are Karl Rove and his liege lord, the bait-and-switch king, trying to have it both ways? You bet. And that ought to be a crime, because there are real lives at stake.
More Herbert and the Democrats, below
I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd. From the Bush-Rove perspective, General Casey's plan is not a serious strategic proposal. It's a straw in the political wind.
....
We've had enough clownish debates on the Senate floor and elsewhere. We've had enough muscle-flexing in the White House and on Capitol Hill by guys who ran and hid when they were young and their country was at war. And it's time to stop using generals and their forces under fire in the field for cheap partisan political purposes.
Meanwhile from the Washington Post:
Senate Democrats reacted angrily yesterday to a report that the U.S. commander in Iraq had privately presented a plan for significant troop reductions in the same week they came under attack by Republicans for trying to set a timetable for withdrawal.
Hell yes, they should be angry and so should the American people. Has there ever been a bigger bunch of hypocrites. Boxer and Kerry had the correct responses:
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said that the plan attributed to Gen. George W. Casey resembles the thinking of many Democrats who voted for a nonbinding resolution to begin a troop drawdown in December. That resolution was defeated on a largely party-line vote in the Senate on Thursday.
"That means the only people who have fought us and fought us against the timetable, the only ones still saying there shouldn't be a timetable really are the Republicans in the United States Senate and in the Congress," Boxer said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Now it turns out we're in sync with General Casey."
...
Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored an unsuccessful resolution setting a July 1, 2007, deadline for the removal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, issued a statement saying the Casey plan looks "an awful lot like what the Republicans spent the last week attacking. Will the partisan attack dogs now turn their venom and disinformation campaign on General Casey?"
The point that should be hammered home is this:
The Republicans are playing politics with our soldiers lives. To stay on the same course in Iraq endangers our soldiers and the Iraqi people and is unfair to the American people.
The fact that the military has prepared a withdrawal plan consistent with the Democratic proposal shows that the Republicans are out of touch and and demonstrates that their accusations that a troop withdrawal plan represents a desire to "cut and run" is nothing more than political gamesmanship.