via Sheridan Folger
Although that does sum it up, I thought a review of what Democrats actually said and did might be helpful:
When Bush doubled down with the surge in early 2007, Democrats placed a huge bet on failure and sat back to enjoy and cash in their winnings. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid released a joint letter that said a surge would be useless; Senators Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel introduced a resolution opposing the buildup; votes of no confidence followed in rapid succession. "We are going to pick up seats as a result of this war," Reid exulted. Democrats in the Senate spent much of their time forcing a series of votes designed to get their opponents on record as backing the war and the president. In June 2007, Reid declared the war lost.
By the end of that summer, disturbed by some hint that better news might be coming, Democrats tried a preemptive strike on the testimony to Congress of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. "Dead flat wrong," Biden pronounced their assessment, before it had even been delivered. Rahm Emanuel predicted a report deserving of a "Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction." Hillary Clinton said the reports of improvement in Iraq required a "willing suspension of disbelief." Signs of success gave Democrats the vapors. In the face of an optimistic report from General Jack Keane, one of the principal authors of the surge strategy, Representative Nancy Boyda of Kansas became so unnerved that she fled from the hearing. "There was only so much that you could take until we in fact had to leave the room for a while," she said.
If the mere possibility of small signs of progress could so unnerve Democrats last summer, the party might want to lie down and rest for a while as it contemplates a convention, a campaign, and an election to follow, with no failed war to run on, and no George Bush to blame for it. If the war has been won, somebody has to have won it. They can still claim the war failed (in spite of succeeding), or is likely to flare up again at any moment, but that makes Obama's lack of experience still more disturbing.
Read the whole thing. It's delicious.
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