This couldn’t be clearer to those of us who live in the reality based world. Under the Cheney/Bush-Bush/Cheney Adminstration, we’ve weakened our troop strength, squandered billions of dollars with no military or diplomatic results. We have become a joke and a worry for the entire diplomatic community; where we once were a respected and trusted partner we are now a divider and our strategies have failed at every turn. Junior and Dead Eye Dick contiune to live in their self imposed rose colored bubble and refuse to be accountable for their failures and adjust our fundamental policies and military strategies which just might get us out of this quaqmire with a little of our countries self-respect. The “surge” is just more of the same and if the same wasn’t working, why would this? It won’t and it’ll cost more American and Iraqi lives.

Joe Conason over at the New York Observer gives a much better written op-ed piece of where we’ve been and where we’re heading…the same place, just a different date. It’s a must read: The Last Thores of Cheney’s Credibility

So perhaps the Democrats deserve more than a month or two to determine how we might best extricate our troops from that complex and perilous situation.

Besides, as the White House has loudly proclaimed, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney will ignore any Congressional action that would cut short their bloody misadventure. Rather than engage in honest debate over a saner course in Iraq, the Vice President has resorted to the same discredited rhetoric used by him and his allies from the beginning.

Seeking to intimidate the Congressional leaders last week, he recited the misleading old formula conflating war in Iraq with the struggle against Al Qaeda. His theories on that subject have been blown up with the same force and frequency as those daily explosions on Baghdad’s streets. Only a few days ago, the Pentagon Inspector General issued a devastating report describing how Mr. Cheney’s agents in the Defense Department distorted intelligence to “prove” the mythical linkage between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Moreover, every credible analysis of the Iraq insurgency estimates that only a tiny fraction of the fighters are linked to Al Qaeda in any significant way. While the jihadist movement is growing, Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants can profit from our mistakes without leaving their strongholds thousands of miles away.

But Mr. Cheney cares nothing for those facts. As the official who most vehemently assured us of the certain existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he remains immune to the kind of embarrassment that would have required an honorable man to resign from office long ago.