sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

On NewsHour this week, following the delivery of the bill proposing $124 billion for the military -- contingent upon a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq -- Jim Lehrer spoke with Senators Patty Murray (D), Washington, and Kay Hutchinson (R), Texas.

Midway through, Lehrer cut away from the interview to play almost live footage of Bush's speech moments after he vetoed the bill. "Setting a deadline for withdrawal is setting a date for failure, and that would be irresponsible." This is, of course, the same rhetoric the administration has been issuing for quite some time, and to which the Democrats have consistently failed to offer a compelling counterargument.

When the interview with the two Senators resumed, Lehrer appropriately shifted his questions to, essentially, focus on "What now?" Senator Hutchinson suggested that the Democrats were withholding funding from the troops, effectively putting them in danger. "We're not. Our troops will have what they need," Senator Murray responded.

Here's where it gets interesting. One of the failings of the media on this topic has been that they have allowed the Republicans to propagate an image of troops walking into battle tomorrow without proper equipment, because the Democrats are withholding funding. Even someone, like myself, who knows very little about how military appropriations are distributed, knows that there's a few months of wiggle room before the coffers run dry. So a debate over funding, in the short term, does not by any means equate to "withholding funding."

However, Lehrer failed yet again to interrogate the question from that angle, and instead grilled Murray on the Democrats long term intentions: "If it is ends up that you can't get what you want, which are timetables that are in the legislation -- it's either timetables in the legislation or the money, you will take the money, right?"

This question isn't inappropriate, by any means... it's certainly relevant to know whether the Democrats will back down (and the almost certainly will) before the coffers run dry, and Murray opened the door with her off the cuff promise that "our troops will have what they need."

What's intriguing, rather, is the relationship between the President's earlier line of reasoning about timelines for withdrawal, and Lehrer's line of questioning over the Democrats eventual funding plans.

Essentially, in the battle over funding and timelines, the Democrats are operating under a timeline of their own. It's a vague timeline, but a de facto one: they have to win quickly, or they'll be forced to "withdraw," granting funding without restrictions or oversight. This means that the Bush Administration simply has to dig in its heals until the Democrats back down... which they eventually will.

This scenario can be interpreted in multiple ways.

On the left, it could be said that the Bush Administration is pulling a hypocritical role-reversal, using a de facto timeline to put pressure on the Democrats to allocate funding, while being unwilling to accept the Democrats timeline for the specific allocation of that funding.

On the right, however, is a far more convincing point -- if the pressure of a timeline causes the Democrats to fail to accomplish their legislative goals, it simply drives home the point that timelines are more useful as a rallying point for the opposition than as a yardstick for success.

That being said, the rhetoric of "emboldening the enemy" is completely bogus. As I've said in the past, there haven't been any Al Qaeda focus groups on responses to US Policy, so it's entirely speculation and, in fact, the Democrats have less successfully claimed that the ongoing quagmire in Iraq will do more to "embolden the enemy" than a withdrawal timeline would. Neither of these claims hold any water.

Finally, it's worth noting that the media, by and large, has completely failed -- in addition to the earlier point about the rhetoric of "withholding support" -- to question the rhetoric of the timeline. Specifically, the congressional bill did not explicitly call for a withdrawal of troops on a timeline, regardless of the situation on the ground. Rather, and far more responsibly, it called for a timeline of targets... essentially saying that the military should try to withdraw troops based on the timeline. However, if the situation on the ground did not allow for adherence to the timeline, the bill would not by any means cut off funding for the war... rather, it would simply demand that the Administration explain, publicly, why the timeline has not been met.

The bill, ultimately, is not about timelines or withdrawals so much as it is about communication and accountability, a point which has been glossed over by the media, which has chosen to simply pass along the usual stream of partisan rhetoric.