Republicans vote to NOT ALLOW the Iraq funding to be voted on, but the Democrats get the blame. So what's new?

Senator Harry Reid might just be pushing this thing a little too far and too long ... for now at least! After he was unable to get the sixty (60) votes needed for cloture on Tuesday night (Wednesday morning--yawn!), the all-nighter that kept the Senate members up after their beddie-bye time (as well as me) was a big nothing.

And maybe that's as it should be. They clearly are not going to be able to get the votes needed to cut off the funding for our Armed Forces and so the question might be, "why not wait until September and see what General Petraeis has to say?"

On the upside is the possibility, no matter how remote it might seem to us all, that the war in Iraq will turn around and peace and democracy will come to the Iraq people and we can bring our troops home victoriously. The downside, of course, is that another two hundred soldiers will die between now and then ... and nothing will have been accomplished other than the passage of time.

Given the long Congressional recess in August, there is now little, if any, prospect for significant Senate debate on a real change of course in Iraq until after Labor Day. How soon the debate, on at least a piece of legislation, could resume is not clear.

And that is a shame.

The point of these congressional debates, at least in the slightly more fertile ground of the Senate, should be to put maximum pressure on Bush to end a combat role for U.S. troops and ramp up diplomatic efforts.

As it was, four Republicans voted with the Democrats on Wednesday morning to stop the debate and vote on the funding (Senator Reid voted against cloture only so that it could be brought up again) and it only received 53 votes.

Sadly, the White House jumped on the Democrats for not "supporting the funding bill" when it was the Republicans who didn't allow the bill to come up for a vote. And the sad fact of the matter is that most Americans who get their news in sound bites will be left blaming the Democrats for not voting our soldiers a pay raise, among other things.

We do live in a strange world!