The anti-war rhetoric of the anti-war Democratic party escalates:

WASHINGTON - After Republicans blocked a Senate debate for a second time, Democrats said Saturday they’ll drop efforts to pass a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq and instead will offer a flurry of anti-war legislation “just like in the days of Vietnam.”

The tough talk came a day after the House of Representatives passed its own anti-Iraq resolution and as the GOP used a procedural vote to stop the Senate from taking a position on the 21,500 troop increase.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would be “relentless.”

“There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam,” Schumer said. “The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm’s way and come home.”

Mark Coffey writes in response:

The gloves are off, that’s clear…and the mask is falling off, too. The ‘moderate’ Democrats who won the 2006 midterms are nowhere in sight. When Senators as well-regarded as Schumer start talking like columnists for The Nation, you can bet that we are through the looking glass.

Indeed - and just for the record, the masks started slipping off just a couple of weeks before the election (more here). With the exception of Harold Ford, Jr., the Dems managed to keep ‘em in place long enough to get themselves and/or their guy elected/re-elected, though.

I wrote this back in October on the Dem obsession with Vietnam (as well as the media’s), and it still holds true - perhaps even more so - today:

Who helped ensure that sure those [Vietnam] anti-war sentiments increased higher and higher, which put more and more pressure on our politicians to advocate withdrawal from Vietnam? Who made sure the news was saturated day in and day out with anti-war sentiment so much to the point that you knew about the violent anti-war protests here, Hanoi Jane’s picture with North Vietnamese troops day, and John Kerry’s testimony about alleged attrocities our troops were enaging in? Who embellished what was going on in Vietnam to make it sound worse than it actually was? Answer to all of the above: the mainstream media with the help of anti-war Democrats like Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, John Kerry - just to name a few.

And they’re trying to do it again today with Iraq. The Iraq/Vietnam comparison has been thrown out there even before the Iraq war even started. I can remember that about three days into the war, when we were first starting to hear stories about troops being killed or captured, the usual suspects started wondering if this was going to be the ‘next Vietnam.’ The same thing happened in the opening month of the war in Afghanistan. All wars, to the media and Democrats, are viewed through the prism of Vietnam. The first sign of bloodshed that an American soldier suffers means the war is ‘turning into Vietnam.’ Once that feeling really takes root, there’s no turning back and everything negative that happens in a war is spun into ‘being just like Vietnam.’ It’s the defeatist mentality at its worst.

The Dems and the media are not stupid when it comes to understanding how to go about shaping the opinions of the American people: they know America remembers the Vietnam war, the tens of thousands of American soldiers we lost as a result of that war, the daily drumbeat of negative headlines and images from that time, and they know the impact it all had on war support here at home. They are fully aware of the power they have to influence the American people one way or the other and they couldn’t be more happy right now that the President has supposedly joined them in their routine paralleling this war with Vietnam, because the President supposedly ‘agreeing’ with them means he might come around to ‘acknowledging’ that Iraq war is lost, and that we should withdraw. It would be a defeat for a US president and America all over again, and would once again ‘prove’ to the world that America has ‘no business asserting its power’ in other countries - unless it’s a country the UN favors intervention in, of course.

They were ’successful’ regarding Vietnam. Let’s hope that their blatant dishonesty and one-sided coverage of the war in Iraq doesn’t mean they’ll be ’successful’ with the Iraq war, too.

And now we have an admission from a prominent Democratic Senator that in the coming weeks regarding the issue of Iraq Congress will pass anti-war resolution after resolution “just like in the days of Vietnam.”

The Democratic party as it exists today is as disgraceful as it gets. They pass ‘non-binding’ resolutions expressing their lack of support for the President’s surge plan because they’re too chicken to to actually pass a bill with teeth against the Iraq war, refuse to debate any alternative Iraq war resolutions in the Senate which would declare support for our troops, and push for a behind the scenes ’slow bleed’ strategy designed to force the President into an early withdrawal of our forces from Iraq. The appeasement party of McGovern has returned full force.

Pathetic.

(Via James Taranto at the WSJ’s Best of the Web Today.)

Related: Speaking of Vietnam, Jules Crittenden wonders if the enemy is capable of a Tet-like offensive in Iraq. (Hat tip: Bob Owens, who writes a post examining the surge’s impact in Baghdad so far).