It would seem that the Netroots aren’t getting the love from their ostensible possession that they’d like:

Instead, they say, its because the groups simply have won all the Democratic votes theyre going to get. The only place to pick up more votes, at least for the next year, is on the Republican side.

And the only means for accomplishing that, it seems, is for the anti-war groups to reach out more emphatically to Republicans who have expressed doubts about the war in search of a compromise that could win their votes while keeping almost all the Democrats in the fold. What was always missing, and continues to elude us, is the 10 to 12 Republicans who will come over to our side and help us break the logjam, said Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, one of the sponsors of the legislation to set a timetable to withdraw troops. If there were any missing energy in the anti-war movement, he said, that might be where they could apply it.

…

The other option is to redirect their efforts to the 2008 election campaigns and target a group of Republicans for defeat, especially in the Senate. That approach worked well for the anti-war groups in 2006, when the voters put both houses of Congress into Democratic hands, and some in the movement have concluded that it is the only goal worth pursuing now since Republicans arent changing their votes.

Yes, again, bits to quibble about in there - although it’s frankly in the GOP’s best interests for the Netroots to keep telling themselves that they were instrumental in flipping Congress - but let’s get past that and look at the main points. The short version: the antiwar movement cannot get a Democratic-controlled Congress to end the war. Their options are then apparently to either get more Republicans on-side, or else get rid of enough of them to have an even larger majority, starting in 2009. Let’s look at both.

Getting more Republicans on-side would seem to be the easier solution, except for one problem: the netroots won’t accept that they’d have to compromise on a good number of things, not to mention treat GOP Congressmen as real, live human beings. Given that one standard antiwar tactic is to accuse Republicans of every crime short of actual sexual congress with livestock, you can imagine that this is proving to be a bit of a problem for them. For that matter, being willing to compromise implies that the person offering the compromise is willing to entertain the possibility that s/he was not 150% correct about the situation - which, given the essentially religious nature of antiwar activism, makes this option a no-go right there.

The other plan - to elect more Democrats - is probably workable, in that it doesn’t require the netroots to actually engage in self-criticism in the way that they’ve been wasting everyone’s time for the last… heck, for some of them it’s getting on “few decades.” However, there is one small wrinkle to that plan; based on what we’ve seen so far, it won’t work. Oh, sure, they might be able to help skew the balance in Congress a bit more for their masters - but in terms of actual policy change, well, why would the Democrats care? As I’ve noted before, you told them back in the day that you’d vote for a cheese sandwich over George Bush; you thought that you were demanding better candidates, but what you were really asking for was an endless supply of cheese sandwiches.

But I’d like to end this with a thought experiment. Let us suppose that back in 2002 the progressives had sent a couple of their Congressfolk to the President with this message:

Hi. We don’t like you, we don’t trust you, and that goes double for your Party. We’ve established that? Good.

Your call, W.

Let me tell you what would have happened, had you done this. First off, the progressives would currently be the most powerful faction in Congress, instead of the most marginalized. Assuming that we lost the House and Senate in 2006 anyway - which I think that we would have; domestic factors were paramount in that election - Bush would need your support to keep a solid majority on the war, and the rest of the Democrats would be mightily kissing your collective backside to keep their majority on domestic issues. Second, we’d have less troops in Iraq. Our enemy worked out a long time ago that engaging in atrocities would pay dividends in American foreign policy debate: the more they did, the more the Democrats would fulminate, the more the media would lovingly record the whole thing. Absent that incentive, we’d be farther along in our goal of creating an Iraqi government that we can honorably throw the keys at on our way out the door. That means a smaller footprint. Third - and, by the way, this would have been my primary reason, if I had been in your shoes - it’d have been the moral, ethical, and right thing to do.

But, you didn’t do any of that - so now you get to engage in a fun electoral season of trying to get more of the same people who took your money and then lied to you into office… so that they can take your money and then lie to you. But, hey: it may be a cheese sandwich, but at least you showed that damned George W Bush who was the boss of you.

Yup, you certainly did.

Moe Lane