Democratic spine in a strange place

After months of kowtowing (and that's a nice way to put it) to the Bush administration, Democratic congresscritters are muscling up on other turf. Case in point, Sen. Carl Levin who:

said that the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki should be voted from office because it had proved incapable of reaching the political compromises required to end violence there.

snip

"I've concluded that this is a government which cannot, is unable to, achieve a political settlement," Levin said. "It is too bound to its own sectarian roots, and it is too tied to forces in Iraq, which do not yield themselves to compromise."

In a conference call with reporters from Tel Aviv, Levin called on the Iraqi Parliament to vote the Maliki government from power because it had "totally and utterly failed" to reach a political settlement, and to replace it with a team better able to forge national unity.

The Maliki government was the result of compromises in the Iraqi parliament, so unless they start hauling out their AKs and reducing the differing sectors to more manageable corpses, it hard to see what they can do.

And that fails to touch on the main distinction that Sen. Levin evidently missed while he was visiting with the Greatest General EVAR, Maliki, the government, and the parliment of Iraq have zero power. Their lives are protected because they huddle in the green zone behind American guns. But now Sen. Levin is too macho, and brave to mention facts like that.

On the Iraq front, we must conclude that there has been a grand concord of the tough guys. Guys like Petraeus, Levin, and Bush who know how to stay the course, and demand results from... Maliki, are now on the same page.

Here in the US, the political upshot is that Democratic congresscritters haven't grown a new spine at all, they've had one shoved up their ass.