THE LOW POST: Timetable to Nowhere

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In medicine they call it "drug-seeking behavior." A guy shows up at three different regional hospital emergency rooms in the space of a month, each time complaining of severe but non-specific lower back pain. Suspiciously, he is well-versed in the various milligram dosages of commercial hydrocodone. Ask him to wait an extra hour in the exam room, he starts bouncing his knees, and his forehead starts to pour sweat...

Does this man's back really hurt? Maybe it does. You have to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least the first time. But the moment that orgasmic smile flashes across his face as soon as you hand him his Oxy scrip, you have to wonder. Just like I'm wondering right now, after watching what looked suspiciously like a carefully-orchestrated congressional vote-seeking charade, i.e. the recent "controversial" scheduled-withdrawal/Iraq-timetable vote in the Senate.

It's been less than a few hours since the Chris Matthewses of the world received the "breaking news" that Mississippi Republican Thad Cochran has fallen short in his valiant attempt to block the Democrat-sponsored vote, a measure calling for a withdrawal of all troops from Iraq by next March. Cochran's gambit failed when Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel decided to publicly sell out the President, noting about four years too late that Iraq was basically "Bush's war" (of course, it was also very much the Senate's war back when the polls happened to support it) and that the president's strategy was borne of "arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam." Taking a direct swipe at Dick Cheney, who as recently as last week emerged from his haze of coronary disorders to decry war detractors as traitors and terrorist enablers, Hagel also said that "this idea that somehow you don't support the troops if you don't continue in a lemming-like way to accept whatever this administration's policy is, that's what's wrong, and that is dangerous."

Of course it would have been nice if Hagel had taken on the administration's shameless witch-hunting and red-baiting of war opponents at a time when such a stance would have required actual political courage, and not when the poll numbers on a firm Iraq withdrawal are running about 60-38 in favor. But that's where we are right now. Hell, Hagel's main ally in the House these days is none other than North Carolina Republican Walter Jones; the two men are the leading anti-war conservatives in their respective houses. Back in February, the two men spent an enormous amount of time blowing kisses at each other in the pages of papers like the Washington Post, with Jones calling Hagel "one of my heroes" and Hagel lauding Jones's brave efforts to rally conservatives to vote against the Bush "surge." But Jones, careful observers might recall, is the same spineless dingbat who came up with the "Freedom Fries" Franco-bashing campaign when the French bailed on the Iraq invasion in early 2003.