Frisco Nan's Latest Blunder: Iraqi Withdrawal Timetable Legislation

House Speaker Frisco Nan is about to step up to the legislative plate for strikeout number three- backing a bill to set a timetable for US forces to withdraw from Iraq.

The gist of the current situation is that Pelosi's own erstwhile candidate for House Majority Leader, John Murtha of Pennsylvania, is leading his ultra-liberal, anti-war contingent to demand that any resolution the House now passes on Iraq be binding and cut off funding for the war, mandating withdrawal.

Whereas some cowardly Republicans would have run for cover in 2008 by voting for the original Pelosi non-binding resolution, they can safely retreat from Pelosi's new, Murtha-mandated version.

According to Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, in her excellent Friday column on this matter, Nan was unable to muster the House's radical left caucus of 70 Representatives, leaving her the unpalatable option of treating with the Minority's John Boehner to pass any Iraq war resolution.

Instead, she is moving left (yet again, as with the minimum wage fiasco, and the recent card check embarrassment), and planning to attach various pork items (funny, didn't Nan tell us that era was dead? oh, well.....) to lure the centrist, newly-elected Blue Dog House Democrats to vote for Iraq withdrawal and a funding cutoff.

As Ms. Strassel wrote in her column,

"The joke is that even if Ms. Pelosi can buy the moderate wing to her side, her proposal still might go...poof. And why? Her liberal wing, of course. After all the speaker's concessions, anti-war critics were still griping yesterday that the withdrawal proposal left Mr. Bush too much flexibility over the timing. Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Ms. Lee introduced their own amendment to the legislation that would demand a complete withdrawal by year-end."

At this point, I have to ask- don't any of these people recall what happened in Vietnam, when the Democratic Congress sank the prospects for salvaging any time of safety for Vietnam by publicly mandating a pullout by a known date? The North simply outwaited the withdrawal, attacked, and brutally conquered the South. Won't Murtha, Lee and Woolsey be proud when that happens to Iraq?

But, back to Frisco Nan's dilemma. Once again, she's caught between the wings of her party's House delegation. The new, majority-providing centrists Democratic Blue Dogs cannot risk, nor do they even philosophically support, Iraqi withdrawal. Meanwhile, Nan's own ideological kindred group, the ultra-left liberals in the House, won't support any moderation, now that they have finally retaken power after a decade in the wilderness.

Welcome to the big leagues, Nan. Maybe if you focused on the national interest, instead of purely partisan, fringe-group politics, you'd have better results. But, then, that would mean you'd be an above-average Speaker. And that's likely not in the cards for this hack in a skirt.