RCJ

John Tsitrain writes in the Rapid City Journal:

For all the hype about how politically damaging the war in Iraq has been for President George W. Bush, in particular, and Republican supporters of the war, in general, I wonder how many people stop and consider what the war is doing to the Democratic Party, which I think is getting a much tougher, and self-inflicted, thrashing over the war than the GOP.

I hesitate to use a word like "comical" when it comes to an issue of such underlying seriousness, but if ever the classic Jimmy Breslin novel, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight," needed a politically-themed sequel, "The Gang That Couldn't Get It Together," might well describe the Democratic disarray in its political opposition to President Bush on this war.
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And speaking of speeches at a major University, I just read the full text of former Sen. Tom Daschle's speech at Northwestern in November and appreciated the political need for his mea culpa over voting for the war in the first place, while still in office, but was baffled by his plan to withdraw 80,000 troops from Iraq (about half the present deployment) by the end of 2006, while leaving the rest of our forces there with an accelerated training mission. Sounds to me like a political double-sop to voters who want us out and voters who want to stay until the job is done, a fence-straddling stance that adds some confirmation to the notion that Daschle is considering a run for the presidency in 2008.

To his credit, Daschle now defies the effort to put him somewhere on the support/oppose spectrum of the war in Iraq, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear him only add to the confusion every time he tries to clarify his position between now and the '08 primary season or the war's end, whichever comes first.

There's lots of good stuff among the ellipses.  Check out the whole article.