The seemingly most feared meme inside the beltway is that Democrats/progressives don't support the troops. We all know that's a crock of sh*t, but the traditional media continues to write the story that this is where Democrats in the House & Senate are vulnerable and will be why Congress is likely to cave if/when Bush vetoes the supplemental soon to arrive on his desk.
Well guess what - it really, truly is a crock of sh*t and Terence Samuel does a great job of documenting that fact in his American Prospect article, Honoring the Warriors, Ending the War.
A few article quotes below the fold...
Referring to Montana where Bush won by 20% in 2004 and 25% in 2000,
"... it is also out here in the Mountain West, where sudden springtime blizzards can quickly expose the folly of human calculation, that you begin to catch glimpses of what, politically, the administration's gross miscalculations on Iraq have wrought.
...the political ground is shifting so fast that the administration may find itself without the kind of leverage one would have presumed it could count on. While Tester has been firmly against the war -- and campaigned against it – conventional wisdom should still hold that the freshman Democrat would need to be attentive to the larger political reality of red state America;
...
But public apprehension about the war has made all of that unnecessary.
...
Bush's attempts to portray Democrats as political hacks who want to micromanage the Iraq war and play political with American troops while they are "in harm's way" is falling on deaf ears, and if people are not mad at the timeline vote here in Big Sky Country, it hard to know where you could find people who are. [my emphasis]
Samuel's bottom line:
Bush may face an even more determined, and confrontational, Congress when lawmakers return next week than the one that went home for spring break.
One can only hope and pray it will be so.