Oh, please...

...I don't wanna get sucked in again, into thinking these people are serious. But maybe I can think of it as one more step, just one more.

Three Senators - John Kerry, Russ Feingold, and most significantly Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid - have thought the unthinkable, spoken the unspeakable, broached the unbroachable. They have introduced legislation that would cut off all funds for combat operations in Iraq as of March 31, 2008. What's more,

"If the president vetoes the supplemental appropriations bill and continues to resist changing course in Iraq, I will work to ensure this legislation receives a vote in the Senate in the next work period," Reid said in a statement.

But here's the real kicker: I doubt anyone expects the proposal to pass. But

Reid spokesman Jim Manley said if legislation to cut off funding for the war fails, Reid will try again with the hopes of getting new supporters. "It is the next in a series of steps to try to ratchet up the pressure to try to get the administration to change its policies," he said.

That is, he will keep bringing it up. We can even hope he means to bring it up over and over, as many times as necessary. A good sign toward that end is that the article says that Democrats expect that "with each passing week ... they pick up additional support" because people will become "increasingly tired of" the war. Well, dammit, I've been saying that for some time, most recently just a few days ago. Good to see that fact is finally sinking in among some leading Democrats.

Maybe they're not immune to reality, the reality that people are going to want more than symbolic moves against the war, after all. That is, of course, assuming they follow through, which experience says is still a definite "if."

And I don't want to get sucked in again.

Important Footnote: That rising support, particularly in Congress, might rise faster than expected. There's been a fair amount of buzz in the lefty blogosphere about Andrea Mitchell's appearance on Chris Matthews' show Sunday morning, when she said that Gen. David Petraeus had recently met with the Senate Republican caucus to discuss legislative strategy on war funding. (Although she now says it wasn't just Republicans.) But while that generated most of the outrage, this is the part that struck me (and several others) as the significant part:

I think the Republicans are going to crack[, Mitchell said]. What I’ve been told from inside the moderate center of the Republican caucus is that the vote in favor of the president this week - it was against the president but the Republicans holding for the president - was misleading. That they really are not in favor of the surge. They don’t believe it’s going to work. But they basically said the president has until August, until Labor Day. After that, if it doesn’t work, they’re running. ...

They’ll stick until September and then they’ll leave. I believe very firmly that they’re against what he is doing but they feel that General Petraeus has persuaded them that for all intents and purposes, they can’t vote a withdrawal before September.

Some postings have attacked these "moderate" GOPpers (Remember when there actually was such a thing? Mark Hatfield? Charles Goodell?) for not breaking ranks now, condemning them for putting party loyalty above doing the right thing. But I don't read it that way; I read it as an ultimatum: Bush, you've got five months to make this work. Last chance. Screw up and we're history.

If it's true, it is, I say, damn good news. Not the best possible news (that would have been an immediate break) but given the realities of politics and personalities, still damn good news.

(Tip o' the Lotus hat to AmericaBlog for the link to Think Progress.)