"How do you ask..."

"the last man in Iraq to die for a mistake?", to paraphrase John Kerry.

So Republicans in Washington are beginning to whisper "exit strategy."

The flurry began over the weekend, when Representative Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, a conservative Republican, called for the Bush administration to set specific goals for leaving Iraq. That came from the man who was once so upset about French opposition to the war that he insisted that House cafeterias change the name "French fries" to "freedom fries."

I guess the idea now is to withdraw support for continuing our presence in Iraq without also holding any hearings on how we got there in the first place, or who is responsible for the poor...no, complete lack of planning for the occupation. Declare victory and go home.

To do so, without holding anyone in the Bush administration or the Pentagon the slightest bit responsible for the deaths of 1,700 American service men to-date, and countless Iraqi civilians, is craven and shameful. I'm sorry, I simply don't see the stance Walter "freedom fries" Jones has taken as "heroic." Just representative of the extent to which the Republican congress has entirely abandoned its responsibility to serve as a check on unbridled executive power, arrogance, and, of course, incompetence. Just another non-binding resolution that cements the Republican Congress as the irrelevant body it has become in the world of Bush/Cheney.