The Brown Derby closed several years ago, but if I could lay my hands on that house-sized hat, I'd give it a tip for Harry Reid.

Let me start with the confessions. First, I have not always held tight to my pom-poms. More than once in the last six months, I've said some... not all that supportive things about Senator Reid and his ability to move things through the "collegial" axle grease of the Senate. A big part of this was frustration at seeing all that "first hundred hours" legislation come rocketing through the House, only to enter a Senatorial time warp. A bigger part of that was the failure to keep popping that same vetoed Iraq bill back onto Bush's desk until either sweet reason prevailed or Bush's fingers got too tired to scrawl his 'X.' The biggest reason of all was a deep personal need to see Mitch McConnell face down in the mud while Senator Reid does a Riverdance clog on his back (Oh, and Bill O? That there is one of them met-a-phors).

Forget that. My past criticisms arguably makes me little more than a fair weather friend, but I see a lot of blue skies today, and I see one tough senator standing out in the sunshine. I'm damned impressed with Senator Reid.

The media may want to turn the lede on the overnight attempt to break the Republican filibuster into a failure. That doesn't make it so. No matter how dismissive the media may be about event, what really happened is embedded in every story.

Republicans on Wednesday blocked a proposal calling for most U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by next spring.

That's the story in a nutshell. Democrats are working to extract American troops from this mess -- a position favored by a wide majority of the public. Republicans are busy throwing out roadblocks -- a position designed to please the most rabid of the radical right. Oddly enough, my favorite of all headlines following the vote was the one from Fox News, "GOP Torpedoes Iraq Troop Pullout Plan." That's a message I don't mind seeing repeated.

Even more important than the vote, Senator Reid has shown that Democrats are not about to back away from this issue.

After the vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the long debate had not been for naught. "We spent two days showing America that we're not going to back down, that we're going to continue to fight, that if President Bush and his allies continue to refuse to budge, we will continue to show them the way," Reid said.

Best of all, following the Republican filibuster, Senator Reid shelved the underlying defense policy bill, a move that immediately sent McConnell into entertaining apoplexy. Between now and September, while US forces are sweating in Baghdad and the Iraqi parliament is vacationing out of town, I'm hopeful that Senator Reid will continue to push the issue of withdrawal, and continue to sit on the spending bill. With none of the spending in the bill designed to go into effect until October, the effect of holding the bill back is exactly zero -- no matter how many spittle-laden syllables the right wing media machine produces on the subject.

If I'm going to continue to speak my mind about Democratic leaders when I disagree with their actions -- and I am -- then they also deserve a cheer when they've made the right move. There's little doubt in my mind that Harry Reid's actions this week deserve three cheers.

On purely "doing the right thing" grounds, Democrats in the Senate did the right thing. On political grounds... hey, Senator McConnell, is that a clogging tune I hear?