Last February, Democrats in Congress struggled to put various anti-Iraq War resolutions up for a vote in the House and Senate. Republicans resisted. Senate Republicans in particular were effective at preventing debates on the bills to close so a vote could be taken. Then White House surrogates were dispatched to the cable political talk shows to smirk about do-nothing Democrats.

During that time, as Greg Sargent reported, the Dems got their hands on a GOP talking points memo that instructed Republicans in congress to avoid debating Iraq like the plague.

We are writing to urge you not to debate the Democratic Iraq resolution on their terms, but rather on ours.

Democrats want to force us to focus on defending the surge, making the case that it will work and explaining why the President’s new Iraq policy is different from prior efforts and therefore justified.

We urge you to instead broaden the debate to the threat posed to Americans, the world, and all “unbelievers” by radical Islamists. We would further urge you to join us in educating the American people about the views of radical Islamists and the consequences of not defeating radical Islam in Iraq.

The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose.

This is still the strategy, of course. As Eugene Robinson recently noted, President Bush is still claiming that the people we’re fighting in Iraq are the same ones who attacked us on 9/11.

“The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th,” President Bush insisted last Wednesday. But those who planned and executed the Sept. 11 attacks are either dead, in U.S. custody or holed up in Pakistan. They are nowhere near Iraq.

The other part of this strategy is to beat the Dems into submission with dishonest rhetoric. Arianna Huffington comments on the Bill Kristol op ed I blogged about yesterday:

I had a preview of this deluded triumphalist drivel a couple of days earlier — on Thursday afternoon specifically. Even more specifically, I was on the 4:00 pm Amtrak Acela from New York to Washington.

Kristol was sitting a row behind me, talking on his cell phone with someone who apparently shared his optimism. “‘Precipitous withdrawal’ really worked,” I overheard him say, clearly referring to the president’s use of the term in that morning’s press conference. “How many times did he use it? Three? Four?” he asked his interlocutor, and the conversation continued with a round of metaphorical back-slapping for the clever phrase they had “come up with.”

I, of course, have no idea who was on the other end. Tony Snow, perhaps? After all, he and Kristol were colleagues before Snow left Fox. But whoever it was, the emphasis during their conversation on the significance of the “clever” phrase has been emblematic of the White House prepping of the president.

Instead of sending their boss out with the real facts or logical arguments, Bush’s aides and their friends (see Kristol) concoct some nonsense phrase in the spin lab, hand it to him and tell him to go out there and repeat it as often as he can. The latest is “precipitous withdrawal.” It’s the new “cut and run.” It’s actually not all that new: back in January 1969, Richard Nixon used it again and again in his famous “Silent Majority” speech: “The precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace.” Again and again throughout the speech, Nixon used the phrase to paint the nightmarish consequences of a “precipitate withdrawal” from Vietnam. Almost forty years later, George Bush is using the slightly tweaked “precipitous withdrawal” to paint his own nightmarish scenario of what will happen if American forces leave Iraq. And for that, apparently, we have Bill Kristol to thank. At least partially.

By now you’ve heard of the faux filibuster Sen. Harry Reid plans for tonight. Margeret Talev writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

Senate Democrats are planning an all-night session Tuesday, daring Republicans to engage in an old-fashioned filibuster over Iraq troop withdrawals rather than just threatening one.

The tactic was unlikely to deliver the 60-vote supermajority that war critics need to bypass procedural hurdles and amend a defense authorization bill so that it would require withdrawing combat troop in four months.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Monday that a little late-night drama might focus more public attention on why the new Democratic majority still hadn’t enacted binding antiwar legislation as it had campaigned to do.

“If Republicans insist on blocking a change of course in Iraq, Democrats will give them the opportunity to explain this, lots of opportunity to explain this,” Reid said. “We are going to have votes during the night. We’re not going to let everybody go home and have a good night’s rest.”

Bill Scher says the punditocracy for the past six months has wagged its finger at the Dems, telling them to compromise and reach a bipartisan consensus. “In particular, [David] Brooks recently accused Reid of thwarting a biparistan consensus to change course (but remain) in Iraq, for political purposes,” Bill writes. But this “bipartisan consensus” was a figment of pundit imaginations; it never existed in Congress. As has been true for many years, “compromise” in pundit speak means “agreeing with Republicans.”

For six months, the Senate leadership largely took the counsel of the punditocracy. Bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. Compromise for compromise’s sake. The argument was that’s the only way to responsibly govern and win the respect of the electorate.

But it was a bust. Despite all the efforts to water down legislation and curry the favor of the conservative minority, conservatives obstructed most everything anyway.

Few voters realize this, because these filibusters have been mere minutes long, if even that much. If Democrats couldn’t get 60 votes to break a filibuster, they would simply pull legislation off the floor, or not bother to put it on the floor. When Democrats avoid conflict, the media ignore the story, and with it, the conservative obstructions.

Conservatives were able to block popular legislation, without the public knowing about it. There was no political risk taken, no political price paid.

In the past several days a number of prominent Republican senators — e.g., Dick Lugar, John Warner — have called on a change of policy in Iraq, but when pressed about how they will vote they crawl back into their partisan corners and refuse to vote with Democrats. Reid said Republicans blocking the Levin-Reed amendment are “protecting the president instead of protecting the troops.” This is exactly right, and also a heck of a talking point.

I say that any Republican who admits Bush’s policy is wrong but who refuses to stand with Democrats against it ought to be haunted by armies of protesters in weasel costumes. Flush them out, I say.

If anyone but Bill Kristol had written this op ed in yesterday’s Washington Post I would have assumed it to be satire. But it’s Kristol. He’s not kidding.

In Kristol’s world, everything George W. Bush touches turns to gold. His entire administration has been a glorious success, and all of his policies have been wise and well implemented. Although the Iraq War is unpopular, invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and someday everyone will appreciate this. After all, if we hadn’t invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein would still be alive!

I’m not going to quote the thing; you can read it yourself, if you like. But I say that what Kristol writes is not spin. Spin is, IMO, the use of disingenuous language (short of out-and-out lying) to portray something or someone in a deceptive way. But I think Kristol really believes what he writes. I think if Kristol were attempting to spin he’d have included a few loose connections to reality, just to demonstrate he knows what reality is. This piece is so utterly untethered to anything recognizable in our common time-space continuum it can only be called hallucinatory.

In his op ed column today (which I hope to blog about later) Paul Krugman wonders how America’s health care industry and its political supporters get away with lying to Americans about the state of U.S. health care. And the answer is, they get away with it because mass media allows them to get away with it. If you have the money and connections, you can get yourself on a cable TV show and look at the camera and say anything. You can get on CNN and tell people that argyle socks will cure cancer, and the moderator/host will blink a couple of times and say, Really? I didn’t know that.

I think most Americans do, eventually, sort truth from lies when the lies contradict their own experience. They figured out Social Security “privatization” was a scam, for example. They’ve known for a long time the economy is barely limping along in spite of White House spin to the contrary. They’re slower when foreign policy is involved, because they can’t see what’s going on with their own eyes. But I think if only Americans could get accurate information from mass news media, they’d be a lot smarter about foreign policy, as well.

That’s most Americans, notice. Some are too far gone to be salvaged.

If you haven’t already seen it, be sure to read “Ship of Fools” by Johann Hari in yesterday’s Independent. Hari joined a National Review cruise to report on what conservatives say to each other. Here’s just a snip:

Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s one-time nominee to the Supreme Court, mumbles from beneath low-hanging jowls: “The coverage of this war is unbelievable. Even Fox News is unbelievable. You’d think we’re the only ones dying. Enemy casualties aren’t covered. We’re doing an excellent job killing them.”

Then, with a judder, the panel runs momentarily aground. Rich Lowry, the preppy, handsome 38-year-old editor of National Review, says, “The American public isn’t concluding we’re losing in Iraq for any irrational reason. They’re looking at the cold, hard facts.” The Vista Lounge is, as one, perplexed. Lowry continues, “I wish it was true that, because we’re a superpower, we can’t lose. But it’s not.”

No one argues with him. They just look away, in the same manner that people avoid glancing at a crazy person yelling at a bus stop. Then they return to hyperbole and accusations of treachery against people like their editor. The ageing historian Bernard Lewis — who was deputed to stiffen Dick Cheney’s spine in the run-up to the war — declares, “The election in the US is being seen by [the bin Ladenists] as a victory on a par with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We should be prepared for whatever comes next.” This is why the guests paid up to $6,000. This is what they came for. They give him a wheezing, stooping ovation and break for coffee.

Maybe we should build theme parks for these people so they can live in their fantasies and leave the rest of us alone.