Bush vows to resist calls for withdrawal.

Bush vows veto of Iraq funding bill.

How many times have we seen these headlines before? Seems like about 3 times a week since the likelihood first emerged that Congress would pass a bill calling for withdrawal. In his belligerent, bullying threats to veto the funding that goes with that call for withdrawal, Bush has tried to set up a battle between himself and Congressional Democrats, to make it a partisan fight he can exploit.

But what Mister Bush needs to realize is that this is not fight between him and Democrats. It is a fight between him and the majority of the American people, a majority in favor of withdrawal.

According to a new CBS News/New York Times poll (PDF), 64% of Americans believe the U.S. should set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq in 2008. That's up from 57% in the same poll just two weeks ago.

And columnists and op-ed writers around the country speak for this majority.

DeWayne Wickham in the News-Leader of Springfield, Missouri:

Having lost the backing of most Americans for the continued presence of U.S. forces in the middle of Iraq's civil war, Bush now wants to make this conflict the generals' war. He wants people to think that congressional Democrats are undermining this nation's military leaders — not putting the breaks on his war-making power — when they try to force a withdrawal. Bush bamboozled this nation into war with Iraq. Now he is trying to hoodwink Americans into believing that Congress is intruding upon the prerogatives of the generals he ordered into combat. Bush knows better — or at least he should.

Pat Murphy in the Idaho Mountain Express:

Americans are doomed for the next 20 months to endure a presidency driven by a personal obsession—to protect a fragile sense of self-importance with denial of reality. President Bush won't admit the war in Iraq is lost because he and his architects of the "cakewalk" war would be exposed as wrong. Likewise, President Bush's "full confidence" in his dunce attorney general, Alberto Gonzales—who lied his way through U.S. Senate questioning by babbling "I don't recall" and its variation more than 60 times—won't let him fire Gonzales because it would mean admitting he was wrong to entrust him with the most intellectually challenging and constitutionally most powerful agency in the land.

James Klufeld, Newsday: