Good Lede

Paul Krugman: "There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met."

Indeed. Krugman seems disinclined to end his column on a defeast note, but the maddening thing of it is that all signs indicate that this tactic is likely to succeed and Bush will achieve his goal of ensuring that the war is left on the desk of the next president. Perhaps he thinks this'll mean it'll go down in the record books as something his successor "lost" rather than a catastrophic error he made.