I stopped into a Jack Murtha speech this morning reacting to the Petraeus hoopla, and he seems to have fully internalized the critique that Democrats haven't been able to do a damned thing on the war. The speech was a timeline of his various calls for change on Iraq -- a structure which merely served to highlight the sad fact that none of these calls had resulted in a substantive policy shift:

Almost 2 years ago, I publicly voiced my concerns about U.S. policies in Iraq ... 21 months ago I spoke about my concerns of an overstretched Army ... 16 months ago I said that "we must change direction because the nature of the war has changed" ... 14 months ago I held a press conference with Chairman Dave Obey and outlined the deterioration of our Army's readiness ...

And what about since the 2006 election? "Let me tell you, Democrats are unhappy with the Democrats in Congress," he said. Well, maybe Congressional Democrats can at least take some credit for pressuring Bush into his recent call for small troop withdrawals? "Nah, [Bush did that] because they just don't have enough troops," he said. The whole thing was a bit weird -- isn't Murtha, well, a leader in that do-nothing body he was dumping on? And it was also a depressing preview of the next six months of Congressional war debate, which Murtha -- who seemed to be suffering from no small amount of war-debate fatigue and jadedness -- has written off as pointless because he believes Republicans will stay on the war bandwagon until their primaries are over next summer. One frustrated audience member asked Murtha if he expected the House to be arguing over the exact same provisions -- timeline or no timeline, close Gitmo or don't close it -- next February during the '09 budget negotiations. "Are we going to go through this all over again?" she demanded. "Yes," Murtha shrugged with a curious nonchalance, his hands in his suit pockets. --Eve Fairbanks