Friday, July 21, 2006 | 7:48 a.m.
Some Republican lawmakers evidently are backing away from President Bush's Iraq war policy, as the public's opinion of the war plummets and the November elections approach.
According to a story by the Washington Post on Thursday, congressional Republicans are edging away from President Bush's stay-the-course stubbornness and are saying that they don't have to agree with his every decision about the war. His policy, they say, has left America with two tough choices in the war - to stay and fight or concede defeat to terrorists.
It represents a turnaround for the GOP politicians who have long accused those who question Bush's war policies of being unpatriotic and even sympathetic to terrorists.
Probably the most dramatic of these changes came from Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., who recently told the National Press Club that candidates who want to win re-election this year "obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda."
This, from the same man who, when appearing on television's "Meet the Press" in 2004 with Sen. Tom Daschle - a man Thune later defeated - said Daschle's criticism of Bush's Iraq policy served to "embolden the enemy." Evidently, Thune now figures staying the course emboldens Democrats running against Republicans in November.
Rep. Gil Gutknecht, R-Minn., returned from a visit to Iraq last week calling for immediate troop withdrawals, saying that the situation was worse "than we'd been led to believe." Of Bush's position, Gutknecht told the Post that "I don't think that course is politically sustainable."
How these caged birds are singing now. One would think that the deaths of more than 2,500 American military personnel, the wounding of more than 18,000 others and a death toll among Iraqi citizens that last month alone amounted to an average of 100 a day would have been enough to grab Republican lawmakers' attention long ago.
One would think that maybe the billions upon billions of dollars being stripped from domestic programs and tossed at this war would have at least raised an eyebrow.
A handful of Republicans have criticized Bush's war plan. Yet it has taken an upcoming election and the very real possibility that the Republicans' political heyday could be ending to make the rest acknowledge the death, destruction and economic disaster wrought by the Bush administration's failing Iraq war policy. It is a shame and a disgrace, to be sure. But, whatever works.
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