Friday Happy Hour in the Roosevelt Room

I’ve been encouraged the past few weeks to see GOP Senators Domenici, Lugar, Voinovich, and others up for re-election this cycle split with the White House over the war in Iraq, but these guys can be slippery. Last Friday Bush invited a bunch of them, along with some friendly reporters to the Roosevelt room to hear Bush go on about the Almighty’s plan for freedom in the mid-east.

One result of this is that William Kristol wrote a puff piece in the Wa Po Monday about how swimmingly things are going and that history will judge the Bush administration to be a great success. This is no big deal for those who realize that Kristol has been dead wrong on Iraq for five years straight.

But there must have been something in that kool-aid they were serving because Wednesday only four GOP senators voted to end debate and force a vote on a house-passed measure that would have started to bring the troops home. That vote failed 52-47, it could have passed if it had been brought to a vote, forcing Bush to veto the 2008 Defense Authorization bill, or commence troop withdrawals in 120 days. Both Texas senators voted nay, Cornyn because he can’t get anything right, and Hutchison I think, showing that dread shared by many ambitious female politicians of being seen as soft on defense. (See Hillary Clinton, October 2002)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to drop my representatives a line and remind them that I don’t approve of the president’s plan to continue the Iraq war through January 2009.