For defeats sake

Rich Lowry:

SENATE Majority Leader Harry Reid had a bright, shining moment of honesty when he said that the war in Iraq is lost.

He unburdened himself of what he and many of his colleagues have long believed about the war. Now if only Democrats saw fit to continue with their truth-telling. Then they would acknowledge that their mandate for a U.S. withdrawal beginning in October is a policy predicated on our defeat, and that they don't think anything can or should be done about Iran and al Qaeda feasting on a prostrate Iraq and the country possibly descending into genocidal bloodletting.

This position would be unimpeachably logical. It would accept, in the words Reid has repeated a lot lately, "facts and reality," as Democrats see them. One could strenuously disagree with this position but still see a certain honor in its frankness and internal consistency.

Democrats, of course, are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, after Reid's "lost" comment, they retreated back into their fog of evasion, contradictions and groan-inducing implausibilities. The party of defeat has a deep identity crisis because it can't admit what it is, and thus lives a life of dishonesty and unconvincing denial.

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There is more on the Democrats' semantic battle with its own rhetoric. The Democrats have chosen a strategy for failure in Iraq and called it something else. They are a party made up of people with no expertise in war fighting much less winning trying to tell the generals how to lose while blaming it on the Bush administration. At some point their kook base is going to wake up and ralize they have been had too.