Even as American efforts in Iraq seem increasingly successful, democrats remain determined to devote their legislative agenda to snatching at defeat, reports the New York Times. After all, their constituency demands it.

Democrats in Congress failed once again Friday to shift President Bush’s war strategy in Iraq, but insisted that they would not let up. Their explanation for their latest foiled effort seemed to boil down to a simple question: “What else are we supposed to do?”

Frustrated by the lack of political progress in Iraq, under pressure by antiwar groups and mindful of polls showing that most Americans want the war to end, the Democrats last week put forward a $50 billion war spending bill with strings attached knowing it would fail.

Like so many of the war-related measures that Democrats have proposed this year, the spending bill sought to set a timeline for redeploying American troops, and to narrow the mission to focus on counterterrorism and on the training of Iraq’s security forces.

And, like so many of the war-related measures that Democrats proposed this year, it was approved in the House only to wither and die in the Senate, where on Friday it fell 7 votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a Republican filibuster — with 45 senators voting to block the measure.

All signs indicate that Democrats will continue proposing such measures as long as Mr. Bush remains in office and troops remain in Iraq. “We are going to keep plugging away,” said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Democratic lawmakers and strategists on Capitol Hill said their hope was that even if Republican support for Mr. Bush’s strategy held firm, voters would reward Democrats for their efforts at the polls next November, and that there was no risk to failing again and again.

To believe that, you have to believe that a majority of Americans are yearning for American defeat and think that a new Caliphate in Baghdad is just what the doctor ordered. Our delusional coastal elites are so self-mesmerized with their theologies of pacifist sanctimony and cultural self-criticism that they are capable of reaching any anti-Bush, anti-American conclusion, however preposterous, but outside of Berkeley and Brookline and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it is not going to be easy to find a majority which is going to agree that undermining the US military in the field is Congress’s first duty.