The Washington Post’s David Ignatius poses a reasonable question: “How to extricate ourselves [from Iraq] in a way that minimizes the damage to the United States, its allies and Iraq?” Unfortunately, his proposed solutions aren’t nearly as sensible as his question.

A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work. Some members of Congress argue that pressure for an American troop withdrawal will persuade the Iraqis to put aside their sectarian agendas, but the opposite is more likely to be true.

First, congressional critics of the war can take as many deep breaths as they want, but that won’t have any impact on Iraq policy. Indeed, Ignatius has it backwards — the White House is not going to start withdrawing troops if Congress stops asking him to. Recent history — and common sense — suggests the opposite.

Second, Ignatius also argues that congressional demands are not productive in encouraging Iraqis. Oddly enough, Bush administration officials have come to the opposite conclusion. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in April that demands in Congress for a timeline to withdraw are good for Iraq because they exert pressure on Iraq’s leaders. “The debate in Congress … has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited,” Gates told reporters. “The strong feelings expressed in the Congress about the timetable probably has had a positive impact … in terms of communicating to the Iraqis that this is not an open-ended commitment.”

Similarly, Condoleezza Rice used congressional debate as part of a diplomatic strategy earlier this year, intended to urge Iraqi political leaders to accelerate their efforts.

Ignatius’ column is not necessarily an endorsement of the status quo. He acknowledges that we’ll have to withdraw before too much longer, that the conflict is politically unsustainable, and that we’ve been “arming both sides” of an Iraqi civil war.

But Ignatius apparently believes no one should mention any of this, because it undermines the mission. Or something. I don’t think Ignatius has quite worked out the details.

When history looks back at the Bush presidency, one of the more celebrated quotes that will help capture much of what went wrong will be John DiIulio’s. It was DiIulio, the first director of the president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who told Ron Suskind, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

DiIulio wasn’t expressing disgust so much as disappointment. A conservative Dem and well-regarded academic, DiIulio thought Bush’s White House would be a place where ideas and policy mattered. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s rather difficult not to laugh.

But DiIulio was taken in by the bogus pitch. He noted the other day that it was eight years ago this week that Bush delivered his first campaign speech, which DiIulio helped write, titled, “The Duty of Hope.” Candidate Bush rejected as “destructive” the idea that “if only government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved.” Rather, “from North Central Philadelphia to South Central Los Angeles,” government “must act in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need.” There are “some things the government should be doing, like Medicaid for poor children.”

It led DiIulio to pause to take stock of what happened to “compassionate conservatism.”

[P]overty rates have risen in many cities. In 2005, Washington fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and the White House has vacillated in its support for the region’s recovery and rebuilding process. Most urban religious nonprofit organizations that provide social services in low-income communities still get no public support whatsoever. Several recent administration positions on social policy contradict the compassion vision Bush articulated in 1999.

In May, Bush rejected a bipartisan House bill that increased funding for Head Start, a program that benefits millions of low-income preschoolers…. Last week, Bush threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate plan that would add $35 billion over five years to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The decade-old program insures children in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to afford private insurance. The extra $7 billion a year offered by the Senate would cover a few million more children. New money for the purpose would come from raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

Several former Bush advisers have urged the White House to accept some such SCHIP plan. So have many governors in both parties and Republican leaders in the Senate. In 2003, Bush supported a Medicare bill that increased government spending on prescription drugs for elderly middle-income citizens by hundreds of billions of dollars. But he has pledged only $1 billion a year more for low-income children’s health insurance. His spokesmen say doing any more for the “government-subsidized program” would encourage families to drop private insurance.

But the health-insurance market has already priced out working-poor families by the millions. With a growing population of low-income children, $1 billion a year more would be insufficient even to maintain current per-capita child coverage levels. Some speculate that SCHIP is now hostage to negotiations over the president’s broader plan to expand health coverage via tax cuts and credits. But his plan has no chance in this Congress; besides, treating health insurance for needy children as a political bargaining chip would be wrong.

“Wrong.” How quaint. As if the president still is grounded to such notions.

“Compassionate conservatism” was, of course, a fraud in 1999, allowing Bush to sell himself as a “different” kind of Republican. It’s easy to forget, but for a lot of well-intentioned voters weighing their choices in 2000, Bush almost seemed to mean it.

In DiIulio’s case, he fell for the con. I think he regrets it now.

The headlines are filled with news of British PM Gordon Brown’s first meeting with President Bush since taking office and whether Brown will bring a cooling of Anglo-American relations or even a revisiting of the so-called ‘special relationship’. Perhaps people think it goes without saying. But it simply cannot go without saying that this tussle is virtually all about Iraq. And to the extent it’s not about Iraq it’s about stuff like Gitmo and Global Warming. But on the key issue of Iraq, Brown’s position is the position of a huge majority of Americans. Indeed, Brown’s to-this-point deliberate ambiguity on Iraq leaves open the possibility that he is more hawkish than most Americans, though I doubt that is so.

In any case, the essential point is clear: this rift is much more aptly described as a rift with President Bush and it is more or less the same rift that most Americans have with President Bush.

In fact, since Brown appears to be one of the few non-Koolaid drinkers President Bush is now speaking to about Iraq perhaps, speaking with all humility on behalf of the great majority of Americans who think the president’s policies on Iraq are nuts, he can put in a word for us too?

I don’t want to get into a back and forth about whether it makes sense or sense yet to impeach Alberto Gonzales. But I assume we all agree that members of Congress should have a good enough working knowledge of the constitution to know how impeachment works. According this diary post at Daily Kos (well-known hate site), Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) responded to a constituent letter advocating Gonzales’ impeachment by writing …

The Attorney General serves at the pleasure of the president in a non-impeachable office. Unless convicted of an illegal act, the Attorney General cannot be removed from office without the president asking for or accepting his resignation. However, please be assured that I will keep your thoughts and concerns in mind as I review the circumstances surrounding recent allegations of impropriety within the Justice Department.

This is whacked on a couple levels. First, cabinet officers can most certainly be impeached, as we noted yesterday. Second, convicted of an illegal act? To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing in the constitution whatsoever that makes a criminal conviction for anything relevant to removal from office. It’s just not even part of the equation. Perhaps it’s just nitpicky to point out that the president can simply fire any cabinet officer at any time for any reason, notwithstanding the faux-technical discussion of resignation. The whole letter is written in a hyper-specific sort of of pseudo-constitutional claptrapese to disguise the fact that what’s being said is complete nonsense.

I admit that this has relatively little to do with the great issues on the table before us. And I should note that I do not believe the authenticity of the letter has been confirmed. But it would be nice to know that statements sent out over the names of important elected officials don’t make claims that would garner you a F in high school civics.

We’ve noted Sunday’s NYT editorial endorsing the impeachment of Alberto Gonzales if Solicitor General and acting AG Paul Clement does not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales’ alleged perjury before Congress. But a number of readers have pointed out this odd passage. The Times editorial rather blandly states that it was Vice President Cheney who ordered the nighttime visit to John Ashcroft’s hospital room.

Unwilling to accept [DOJ’s refusal to reauthorize the program], Vice President Dick Cheney sent Mr. Gonzales and another official to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to get him to approve the wiretapping.

The folks at TPMmuckraker are the ones really following this story closely. So perhaps this is a detail that has eluded me. But I was not aware that it had ever been established that Vice President Cheney ordered the visit. Speculated, rumored, sure. But I wasn’t aware this had been established at all.

And yet the Times states it rather offhandedly as a fact. So what do they know?

Editorials like these are sometimes a venue where facts are stuck in which are ‘known’ to be true but which cannot be sourced cleanly or clearly enough to make it onto the news pages. Is that what’s up here?

Obama tells Pat Robertson news organization that faith has been “hijacked” by the religious right. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

An examination of the source of Alberto Gonzales’ “verbal difficulties.”

The most telling part of the Sunday Show reaction to Alberto Gonzales yesterday was that it was treated as a given by pretty much everyone that Gonzales should resign or be fired. The only point really being debated now is whether he’s guilty of perjury, a pretty proud standard for the top law enforcement official in the country. Here’s our round up of all the gory details in today’s episode of TPMtv …

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Edwards campaign to send giant copy of the Constitution to Alberto Gonzales. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.