The Democrats are on thin ground

The Democrats have stepped up their attacks on General Petraeus. Senators Reid and Durbin, the leaders of the Democrats in the Senate held a press conference to trash Petraeus's report before the general has even appeared before Congress.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in his party's weekly radio address today that he expects the Petraeus report to be nothing more than the Bush administration's selective take on the surge.

"Before the report arrives in Congress, it will pass through the White House spin machine, where facts are often ignored or twisted, and intelligence is cherry-picked," said Reid.

On Friday, Reid went so far as to question not only the true source of the report but also the four-star general's honesty.

"He has made a number of statements over the years that have not proven to be factual," Reid said. "I have every belief that this good man will give us what he feels is the right thing to do in his report, but it's not his report anymore. It's Bush's report."

Reid's criticisms have been echoed by his fellow Democratic leaders in Congress.

In a speech Friday at the Center for National Policy, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said, "President Bush is preparing to tell the nation, once again, that his strategy in Iraq is succeeding. We know what the Bush-Petraeus report will say: The surge is working. Be patient. The reality is despite heroic efforts by U.S. troops, the Bush surge is not working."

Rahm Emanuel, a leader of the Democrats in the House joined the anti-Petraeus bandwagon.

Across the Hill in the House of Representatives, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., joined his Senate colleagues in claiming the Petraeus report would be little more than a work of fiction.

"Instead of a new strategy for Iraq, the Bush administration is cherry-picking the data to support their political objectives and preparing a report that will offer another defense of the president's strategy," said Emanuel, the House Democratic Caucus Chair. "We don't need a report that wins the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction."

Notice the attempts to paint this as a White House report rather than one by the commander of the American forces in Iraq, a report that they required him to come make to Congress.

Joe Biden was on Meet the Press yesterday singing with the anti-Petraus chorus.

President Bush's war strategy is failing and the top military commander in Iraq is "dead flat wrong" for warning against major changes, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday.

Ahead of two days of crucial testimony by Bush's leading military and political advisers on Iraq, Sen. Joseph Biden indicated that he and other Democrats would persist in efforts to set target dates for bringing troops home.

"The reality is that, although there has been some mild progress on the security front, there is, in fact, no real security in Baghdad or Anbar province, where I was dealing with the most serious problem, sectarian violence," said Biden, a 2008 presidential candidate who recently returned from Iraq.

Yes, Joe Biden was personally dealing with sectarian violence in Baghdad.

Remember that these same senators unanimously approved General Petraeus for command in Iraq and didn't seem worried then that the man was a stooge for the White House. They pretend to respect him and the military but they're willing to make statements that indicate their belief that a general in the U.S. army would lie about what's going on in Iraq simply to back up a president who will be leaving office in a year and a half. That is a very serious allegation and they are making it before he's even come before them to testify under oath. That is despicable. These are people who vie for American support to run the country and they would blacken the honor of an American general by preemptively calling him a liar about the most important information a general can give the American people.

They are on thin ice here. Americans may not like President Bush or the war, but they don't have much faith in Congress either. The one institution in the United States that has strong majority support is the American military.

Only 5 percent of Americans — a strikingly low number for a sitting president’s handling of such a dominant issue — said they most trust the Bush administration to resolve the war, the poll found. Asked to choose between the administration, Congress and military commanders, 21 percent said they would most trust Congress and 68 percent expressed the most trust in military commanders.

I don't think that Americans will look favorably on Democratic politicians impugning the integrity of an American general. The Democratic leaders might as well have signed on to the Moveon.org ad that will run today in the New York Times.

Tomorrow--as General David Petraeus provides his Iraq assessment to Congress--the antiwar group MoveOn.org is running a full-page advertisement in the New York Times under the headline: "General Petraeus or General Betray us? Cooking the books for the White House."

One Democratic senator spoke anonymously to John Bresnehan of Politico to let us know that depending on outside groups to bash the general for them.

“No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV,” noted one Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition on anonymity. “The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.”

As Pete Hegseth, an Iraq War veteran and founder of Vets for Freedom writes,

Let's be clear: MoveOn.org is suggesting that General Petraeus has 'betrayed' his country. This is disgusting. To attack as a traitor an American general commanding forces in war because his 'on the ground' experience does not align with MoveOn.org's political objectives is utterly shameful. It shows contempt for America's military leadership, as well as for the troops who have confidence in him, as our fellow soldiers in Iraq certainly do.

General Petraeus has served this country for over 35 years with honor, distinction, and integrity. And this is not just about General Petraeus. After all, if General Petraeus is "cooking the books," then the entire military chain of command in Baghdad, and all the staff, military and civilian, who have been working with General Petraeus are complicit, since Petraeus did not write his report in isolation. They are all, apparently, 'betray[ing] us.'

IS there really that much difference between what all these Democratic leaders have been saying and what Moveon.org is willing to put in print?

Both are despicable.