Joe's Rhetorical Grenades

Think Progress has got a Lieberman quote saying:
Some people are genuinely against the war. And I say to them if you are genuinely against the war, then you ought to be fighting to cut the funding off instead of entering into a kind of harassment that’s involved now.

Huh?  It’s ok for Dems to cut off funding to the troops, but it’s not ok for us to set a timetable to remove them?  And if he’s not referring to the timetable as the “harassment” he speaks of, what is he referring to?  He had responded to the question before saying that we shouldn’t “telegraph the day we are going to withdraw,” so I’m assuming that’s the harassment he’s referring to.  But I fail to understand how a timetable is worse than having Dems just cut-off the funds.

If anything, I think this only makes sense if we assume that Lieberman wants Dems to try to cut-off funds, because that would be more politically damaging for them, and they’d be more likely to fail.  After all, the anti-Dem rhetoric coming from Lieberman’s GOP buddies is primarily focused on the idea that we’re cutting off funds, even though we’re not.  It’s like it’s the only argument they have, and so they’re using it, even though it doesn’t apply.  And as things stand, it applies more to the GOP’s veto position than our own.  That they’re willing to cut-off funds to the troops, in order to avoid the timetable.

And now Lieberman is insisting that it’s wrong for us to not walk directly into their offensive against us.  In fact, I’m thinking that’s what the harassment is.  That we’ve actually picked the proper framework to fight this in, and he doesn’t like it because it’s a losing argument for him.  So in essence, he’s attacking us for being political because we won’t fall for his political tricks.  And I’m sure that if the Congressional Dems started to cut-off funding, Lieberman would be right there on their side, insisting that he agrees with their efforts and approves of what they’re doing.  Right.  

And so what this amounts to is Lieberman tossing a rhetorical grenade towards the position that he doesn’t want us to be in, so we’ll move into the position he wants us to be in.  Then we’re toast.  And the answer is: No.  Lieberman can keep his cheap schoolyard taunts and we’ll stay right here where we should be.  We’re not going to wait until this summer when General Petraeus will most assuredly tell us that we’re winning and need to keep slogging, and we will insist on having a timetable for getting our guys out of there.  Again, the main reason why Lieberman thinks our position is harassment is because it’s working.