Harry Reid's hometown paper gives him a smackdown

This editorial from the Las Vegas Review Journal is so on target. I wonder if Harry Reid would actually read it. They're not impressed with his and Pelosi's protestations of how they want to end the war.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said after the White House meeting that while "Democrats are committed to ending this war," lawmakers owe it to the American people to try to reach an agreement with Mr. Bush.

It was a "very positive meeting," Ms. Pelosi said.

What? If Democrats truly want to end the war, they need do only one thing: Go home. Do not meet with the president, do not work for a compromise that will keep American boys dying in Baghdad.

Go home. Take no action. Pass no spending bill whatsoever. By July, existing funds would start to run out. Yes, the White House might cannibalize money from elsewhere for a time. But within months, whatever funds remained would have to be used to fuel up the planes and ships to bring the boys home.

Democrats contend, "The ball is now in the president's court." If so, it's only because they've handed it back to him.

Now, mind you, the fact that the Democrats are racing to get some money into the pipeline so the troops don't run out of ammo is a good thing. Their reasons are more cynical political calculus than patriotism -- they know that declaring the war lost, pulling out and leaving the Iraqis to suffer a massive bloodbath does not play well in the polls.

Remember, challenger Ned Lamont might have won his primary among left-wing Connecticut Democratic zealots last summer, but his "surrender with honor" platform promptly went down to undignified defeat at the hands of pro-war (Democrat-turned-Independent) Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the autumn general elections.

So the strategy of Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Vichy, has been to go through the motions of "trying to cut off funding for the war" so they can tell the Neville Chamberlain branch of their own constituency, "We gave it our best shot" -- all the while with no intention on God's green earth of ever really seeing it happen.

This is good, because (as President Bush has rightly pointed out) announcing to the enemy the date fixed on which you intend to surrender is not exactly a recipe for victory, or even for bolstering your own troops' morale while undermining the other guys.

What's ludicrous is that the Democrats in Washington still insist they're "trying to end the war" -- by which they mean they will now agree to a set of nonbinding, face-saving, endlessly re-interpretable "security benchmarks" that supposedly have to be met if the president wants to keep his forces in Babylon.

The Democrats can't wait to count their political victory for standing firm against General Petraeus's counterinsurgency plan. Actually winning the war is not on the agenda.

Harry Reid, D-Vichy!

Ouch.