Although it was just voted down 60 to 39 in the Senate, there's no reason why the vote on the Democrats' Plan for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq shouldn't be held all over again this week.

I mean, last week the Republicans were all condeming the plan as 'cut and run' with Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist, criticizing it as "dangerous, reckless and shameless."

"Withdrawal is not an option," Frist went on. "Surrender is not a solution."

Even Gen. Casey, U.S. military commander in Iraq, was reported to have said, "there should be no public timetable."

But that was then and this is now.

This week we learn that the Iraqis themselves want a plan for U.S. withdrawal and Gen. Casey, for all his qualms about "public" timetables, apparently has no problem with timetables so long as they're not "public".

So apparently there's a general consensus that we ought to pull out and that we ought to have a timetable to do it by. Since this is precisely what the Senate Democrats were proposing last week, you'd think it'd be easy to cut through all the rhetoric and red-tape and simply re-run last week's vote. No doubt we'll have picked up a few supporters over the weekend.