Congressional comics.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The most enduring and endearing gag in the long-running "Peanuts" comic strip features the gullible - and increasingly fatalistic - Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football held by Lucy. In a 1958 strip, Lucy looks up at Charlie Brown with her hands on the football and says, "I give you my bonded word." After which, Charlie Brown ends up flat on his back, undoubtedly promising himself he won't be fooled again.

The next year, Lucy tells Charlie Brown, "You have to learn to be trusting..." but the result is exactly the same. In 1960, she beams, "The odds now are really in your favor!"

Of course, there are no odds favorable enough to keep Charlie Brown off his back as long as Lucy has her hands on the football.

In an admittedly imperfect political analog to the "Peanuts" story line, Senate Republicans play the part of Lucy, holding a football that represents a change from President Bush's disastrous Iraq policy. And introducing, in the role of the well-intentioned bumbler Charlie Brown, Majority Leader Harry Reid and his team of Democratic placekickers.

In their latest attempt to boot the football, the hapless Ds landed flat on their backs once again after falling four votes short of the 60 needed to cut off debate. Keep in mind that the imminently sensible support-the-troops measure offered by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., didn't cut a nickel from war funding or set any kind of timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. It simply required the military to allow battle-weary troops as much time to rest at home between combat deployments as they spent in the war zone.

Webb's amendment was so obviously troop-friendly it won seven key Republican votes last July, including support from Sens. John Warner and Arlen Specter.

But on Wednesday, Specter and Warner helped their fellow Republicans on Team Lucy yank the football off the tee just as the Charlie Browns gave it a furious kick, believing with all their hearts that "this really could be the time."

Sigh...

The game changed after Gen. David Petraeus gave the Lucys a pep talk peppered with tantalizing images of something he called "success" - as opposed to victory, which amid the chaos and carnage of Iraq lacks a certain linguistic flexibility.

One of the few sensible Republicans on the Iraq fiasco, Oregon's own Gordon Smith, acknowledged that the combination of the upbeat Petraeus testimony and MoveOn.org's politically clueless advertisement ("General Petraeus or General Betray-Us?") that attacked the general's character and patriotism were instrumental in the Webb amendment's defeat.

"I think the effectiveness of Petraeus and his testimony and the counterproductiveness of MoveOn.org froze everyone in their pre-August positions," Smith told The Washington Post. "It's just all politics all the time. This is all about teeing up the 2008 elections, and it has very little to do with governing. And that's a huge disappointment."

Naturally, instead of voting on anything related to the actual madness continuing in Iraq, the venerable statesmen and women of the U.S. Senate turned their attention to the pressing matter of condemning the MoveOn.org ad with an impressive 72-25 rebuke.

If there's a moral to the Charlie Brown saga, perhaps it's that he keeps coming back, despite every broken promise and dirty trick, to take another run at that football. One day, he's going to connect.

Unfortunately, the Iraq debacle is beyond happy endings, and every Democratic failure resulting from Republican support of an unjust and unnecessary war has a continuing toll that can be measured in blood and tax dollars. The Bush presidency ends on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, 486 days from today.

Sigh...