According to Adrianna and Tom

I can't remember why Lonnie has a thing for Arianna Huffington--was it the hair, the accent, the keen political mind?--but she had me at the last line of this excerpt:

With each passing day, Washington, D.C. is turning into the Land That Time Forgot.

While the rest of the country is dealing with the here and now -- exemplified by Bush's puny approval ratings and this new poll showing rural voters turning against the GOP's handling of Iraq -- the Beltway's Democratic dinosaurs are acting like it's 2002. For them, Bush still has credibility on Iraq, Democrats still need to tread lightly in opposing the war for fear of alienating red state and swing voters, and Iraq is still a right vs left issue.

The latest proof that Tyrannosaurus Democrat is not an extinct species comes in the fossilized thinking of Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report. Writing in Roll Call, the Cro-Magnon pundit waxed ecstatic over Congressional Democrats' handling of the war funding issue, spinning the Dems' capitulation as having "played the issue like a Stradivarius," and proclaiming: "From a purely political point of view, Democrats had their cake and ate it too."

Rothenberg's piece is so confounding, it might have been written by David Chase.

Yes, yes, yes!

How can there possibly be political advantage in so maladroitly saying one thing and doing another, especially when what the Dems end up doing is exactly the opposite of what a growing number of Americans of all politcal persuasions seems to want? Leadership. Look it up. It's most definitely in the dictionary, somewhere between character and majority, and it might even introduce victory. But, perhaps that's too complicated: must we draw them a picture? Lucky then, 'cause just last week, Tom Tomorrow did.