any way you look at it, you lose

Listen to this:

What began as a troubling year for Bush, facing a new, energetic Democratic Congress, ended in triumph for the president as frustrated Democrats nursed their losses. Democrats failed in their No. 1 objective to stop the war in Iraq and bowed to Bush and his veto threats on tax policies, energy legislation, children's health insurance and general spending.

This was not Lord Bush's victory, or at least, this was not a victory made by Lord Bush. This was a self-defeat for the Democratic "leadership". If there has ever been a bigger bunch of pussies in the hallowed halls of congress, it has not been during my lifetime*.
Somehow, a group of people who've risen to the top of the power food-chain have failed to grasp the role that image plays in this nation's psyche, a role that the Republicans have grasped with gusto and played to the hilt.
From the start, Democrats should have been sending Bush bill after bill, doing the job that Americans elected them to do. They should have done this regardless of any threat of veto. In the Senate, where things are often harder to get done, compromise might have been acceptable, but not the capitulation which has marked 2007.
If you watched that video from yesterday, you heard Mr. Israel worrying about how Bill Clinton shut down the government in 1994 by vetoing the budget handed him by an "entitlement"-slashing Republican congress. That veto was widely regarded as a defeat for the congress, but that's less because Clinton won than it was because the Republicans were mean-spirited asshats, and most people knew that. In 1994, Clinton was polling at around two-thirds, but in the here and now, Bush is at one third on a good day, and he is the mean-spirited asshat, not the congress.
Congress has the moral and Constitutional authority to cut off funding, to bring home the troops, to cancel tax breaks given to the Oil Companies in addition to the boondogle provided by the Iraq war, to reject candidates who are unsuitable for administering laws, and to investigate whatever it considers to be transgressions of the law, those laws having been created by congress in the first place.
I dont know how much of this the nation will take lying down. Then again, maybe the nations been doing a bit too much lying around anyway. Maybe it's time to get up and get a little loose.

* admittedly, not all that long, relatively.