The anti-war drive has run into trouble on Capitol Hill. "Rank-and-file Democrats in Congress are criticizing the party's leaders for allowing the White House to sap momentum from the antiwar movement during the August recess." See, the game plan here, folks, was for the Democrats to go pick off these Republicans during the August recess, split them off from supporting President Bush, and enable them to go ahead and move forward on their timetable for withdrawal resolutions, their defeat resolutions this September. But it didn't happen.
'The White House is taking great advantage of the Democrats not pushing back,' said Rep. Lynn Woolsey, California Democrat and co-founder of the antiwar Out of Iraq Caucus. 'We need bolder steps in the Democrats.'" We need bolder steps for defeat. Lynn Woolsey is saying we need bolder steps in order to lose this thing! Of course, they're out there saying that Petraeus is going to spin the report. They are calling him a liar. They have been "seizing on other war studies presented this week that highlight failures of the Iraqi government, including a report on Iraqi security forces yesterday by an independent commission headed by retired Marine general. The report, however, did not support calls for a speedy troop withdrawal which Democrats say would extract US forces from a civil war and force the Iraqi government to take charge." That's absolute BS.


The Democrats are trying to destroy the presidency. The Democrats want a military defeat for the US. The Democrats don't care a whit about Iraq, folks! They couldn't care less whether the Iraqi political machine survives and thrives or not. This is all about securing defeat for the United States under the leadership of a Republican president, make no mistake about it.

RUSH: I admit that I got some very perplexed glances from staff members on the scene here high atop the EIB building in midtown Manhattan when I mentioned that the Democrats had opened the door into their face, once again, on their pre-spin of the Petraeus report, questioning my interpretation of this. I could see the looks on their faces: "What do you mean, the Petraeus report?" The Democrats are calling it the Bush report. Even the Drive-Bys are calling it the Bush report. Who organized this? Dingy Harry and Nancy Pelosi are calling it the Bush report. Then last night the Drive-Bys are calling it the Bush report. Of course, when Bin Laden says something, we don't question it. When Ahmadinejad says something, we don't question it. When Petraeus or Bush say something, those stinking liars!

Well, let me play these sound bites, and I will give you an illustration of why I think they have opened the door into their face, once again, thinking that they're going to run rings around the White House. What the White House essentially did here was leak that Petraeus is going to say this thing is going pretty well, we're moving along. What's been the news the last month? The surge is working. The surge is going great guns. Then they leaked it, and guess what? Maybe we'll start pulling some troops out of there, it's going so well. The Democrats didn't want to hear that, that's untenable, and that's their plan. So they started spinning it, Petraeus is just a liar, just a Bush report, and so forth. Here is a montage of that first.

MATTHEWS: Washington awaits the Bush Report on Iraq.

OLBERMANN: President Bush via his surrogate, General David Petraeus, delivers his report.

MURTHA: It's not Petraeus' policy, it's Bush's policy.

MCDERMOTT: The report the White House is writing for General Petraeus.

SWAIN: The Bush Report

RUSH: That's just a sample of the Drive-By Media. Let's go to Baghdad Jim McDermott yesterday on the floor of the House.

MCDERMOTT: "We're kicking ass in Iraq," might be the headline of the report the White House is writing for General Petraeus to deliver to the Congress next week. Here's what the president's kick-ass assessment translates to on the ground: Ten US soldiers killed so far this week; 793 US soldiers killed so far this year; 3,752 US soldiers killed since the beginning of the war, and 27,186 US soldiers wounded since the beginning of the war, and 71,000 documented Iraq civilian deaths since the beginning of the war, although the actual number is much higher.

RUSH: Yeah, like the 400 to 600,000 you guys actually think is true. So what you have here, you have Baghdad Jim heading to the floor of the Senate to try to blunt the good news coming in the Bush report. The Bush report is okay, the Petraeus report is okay, but it doesn't say what the Democrats were led to believe it was going to say. It doesn't say we're kicking ass. It doesn't say that we are going to start immediate troop withdrawals. We need another year-and-a-half here to assess whether or not this is working is what the report is essentially going to say. We need to find out if we can sustain the success that we've had. It is not a braggadocios report. It doesn't beat the chest Tarzan-like. But the Democrats were all prepared for that, and here's more from Baghdad Jim.

MCDERMOTT: "We're kicking ass," is the kind of assessment you hear at a football game and the PR game is clearly on by this president and his minions. They will claim progress next week and tease the American people with talk of token US troop reduction. But because it's coming from this White House, the only thing certain about next week is that it will be their latest attempt to try to mislead us into believing there are enough bullets and bombs and US blood to prevail in Iraq. The best military in the world is being run into the ground by this president.

RUSH: Yeah, the best military in the world which you couldn't care less about, Baghdad Jim, and you can't fool us.