Once again, the Democrats are letting the Bush administration set the terms of debate.  The Republicans have decided to equate progress with military success--something that has been shown illogical over four years of no progress--and are doing so without being called on it by the Democratic leadership.  They have even buffaloed many Democrats into saying that US forces may have to stay in Iraq for decades.

A situation where US forces have to stay in Iraq is not success, no matter how many battles the troops win.  It's an abject failure.

And the Republicans are setting us up for just that failure, yet are calling it "success."

Oh, George Orwell!

Even The Washington Post has been taken in.  In an article today, Jonathan Weisman and Anne E. Kornblut write:

Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front

Positive signs?  What nonsense!  What's going on is about as positive as a bully's "success" when the person being beaten passes out.  There's nothing "positive" about it.  But Weisman and Kornblut, instead of thinking, simply go along with the line they are fed.

Perhaps the Democratic fear comes from a new PR offensive led by Ari Fleisher:

Likening himself to a battlefield general, Fleischer said, "For people who believe in peace through strength, the cavalry is coming."

That's from Think Progress, talking about the:

privately-funded ad campaign [that] will run in 20 states, featuring Iraq war vets and families of fallen soldiers arguing that the war should continue.

Like equating "progress" and "military success," this is nothing more than a smokescreen.  Once more, the idea is to make support for the troops trump common sense.

Are our Democratic Party leaders running scared in the face of this?  Of course they are!  They are backward-looking, and see where they have been defeated by such tactics before.

What we, in `the democratic wing of the Democractic Party,' need to do is turn them around.  The politicians are scared, are trying to cover their butts.  We need to show them that we are the ones they need to be paying attention to... and that we have not been fooled by the Republican nonsense.

The only way our leaders will grow backbones is if we force them to.

Every progressive blogger should diary on this topic.  Each of us should also contact all of our representatives.

Make noise!  Don't let Fleischer and the rest of the Bush shills stampede our bovine leaders once again.