Panic! at the Disco.

The White House is worried about the shifting on Capitol Hill around the Iraq debate. Repeat, they're not worried about the SAFETY AND WELL-BEING OF THE TROOPS IN THE FIELD OR OUR NATIONAL SECURITY, they're worried that Congress might come and take their war away.

What the White House ought to be worried about is the fact that the Iraqi government has not hit one critical target that the Congress set up as benchmarks for progress toward a political solution. Zero. Zilch.

(By the way, though there's a lot to be said about the capitulation in May by the Democrats, and I've said a lot, one thing they were able to extract is a mandate for progress reports. The first one has revealed this total lack of benchmark progress, and it comes precisely at the time when the defense budget is up for debate. To the extent that it may accelerate the end of the war, good show.)

What the White House out to be worried about is the 140,000 Turkish troops amassed at the Iraqi border, a potential crisis that they've done absolutely nothing to stop or even slow down.

What the White House ought to be worried about is the 12 billion dollars a month that this country is spending on wars that are not making any significant progress, and are in fact backsliding into catastrophe. You can bet that the Democratic Congress is worried about that.

What the White House probably does not have to worry about is the behavior of Senate Republicans, who will huff and puff in public but in the end never commit to one amendment that sides with the Defeatocrats.

With the Senate taking up the Defense Department authorization bill during the next two weeks, Senate Republican Conference Chairman Jon Kyl (Ariz.) said Monday that recent GOP statements urging Bush to change his war strategy likely would not translate into many votes for Democratic proposals to redeploy or withdraw troops from Iraq by early next year. Kyl added that most Republican Senators believe September remains the appropriate time to judge the success of the U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

"We are quite unified as a Conference on most of the amendments and the big issues," Kyl said. "Some in the Republican Conference might join some of the Democrat amendments, but, by and large, our approach will be consistent with the administration."

Kyl could be wrong, but I don't think he is. If I had to guess, I'd gather that the Salazar-Domenici "pretend to adopt the pretend Iraq Study Group recommendations" will pass, and the President will make a big show out of saying "We always embraced the Iraq Study Group report," and they'll set a vision for withdrawal if they hit a triple bank shot and everything goes just perfectly (because everything ALWAYS goes perfectly in Iraq), and of course it'll be bullshit and a complete rejection of earlier rhetoric and that will generate fearsome Think Progress blog posts, but beyond that nobody will really care, and the punditocracy will call it a great triumph for sensible centrism, the Republican kind, and nobody will bother to point out that the Salazar-Domenici bill is nonbinding and has no force of law, and in the Office of the Vice President, Fourthbranch and his staff will be high-fiving each other and getting out the maps for Tehran.

Harry Reid, prove me wrong.