Good God, when it comes to finding inventive excuses for backing Bush’s war and occupation of Iraq, the Republicans rubber-stamping their approval of his every act contort themselves so much you’d think they were in Cirque du Soleil.

Now that Harry Reid has cut off their favored escape routes on Iraq by pulling the Defense Appropriations Bill (and thereby preventing Republicans from adding toothless and fake “withdrawal” legislation like Warner-Lugar and the Salazar Distraction to it to give them something to vote for to look “pro-withdrawal” without actually withdrawing), they are beyond being drowning persons grasping at real straws: They’ve invented imaginary ones and pretending they can ride them safely to shore.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

More in GOP want Iraq military limits

By ANNE FLAHERTY and KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writers 1 hour, 45 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – Republicans increasingly are backing a new approach in the Iraq war that could become the party’s mantra come September. It would mean narrowly limited missions for U.S. troops in Iraq but let President Bush decide when troops should leave.

So far, the idea has not attracted the attention of Democratic leaders. They are under substantial pressure by anti-war groups to consider only legislation that orders troops from Iraq.

But the GOP approach quickly is becoming the attractive alternative for Republican lawmakers who want to challenge Bush on the unpopular war without backtracking from their past assertions that it would be disastrous to set deadlines for troop withdrawals.

“This is a necessary adjustment in the national debate to reintroduce bipartisanship, to stop the `gotcha’ politics that are going on that seem to be driven by fringes on both sides and change the terms of the discussion,” said Rep. Phil English, R-Pa.

English is among the more than 40 Republicans in the House and Senate who are sponsoring legislation intended to shift the mission of U.S. troops. Several other GOP lawmakers, facing tight elections next year and a strong anti-war sentiment in their districts, say they are considering this approach.

In the immortal words of the Alan Rickman iteration of Professor Severus Snape: “I. May. Vomit.”

Could Flaherty and Hefling have crammed in any more RNC talking points framing? This thing spins so hard the centifugal force will cause it to crack the earth’s crust before long.

Let’s take it from the top, shall we?

#1: “Narrowly limited missions” is frickin’ meaningless in the context of Iraq. The “mission” is already narrowly limited, as our military is at full stretch in Iraq right now. We can’t anything more than what we’re already doing now, which is to hold on by our bloody fingernails. Does it force Bush to redeploy the troops out of Iraq? No. So this proposed bogus “bipartisan” legislation essentially would allow Bush to do exactly what he’s doing right now: Allow our men and women to be sitting ducks for Saudi-financed Sunni insurgents while he and his fellow PNAC Platoon clowns proclaim that it’s the majority Shiites and their Iranian co-religionists that are the problem.

#2: ‘Bipartisanship’ means ‘Do it the GOP’s way’, which means caving to Bush. You can see that the GOP/Media and DC/K Street elites all got the memo from RNC Central Sunday morning. With Anne Marie Slaughter’s bit of idiocy serving as their banner, it was “bipartisanship” this and “end the politics of personal destruction” that, yadda yadda yadda. The goal, of course, is to try and cow the Democratic politicians away from doing the right thing and listening, not just to their base, but to the 70-plus-percent of the country that is far more left-wing than the national media lets on.

Our goal, of course, is to remind our Congresscritters just how much the Wise Old Men (and Women) of Washington got and get wrong. You know what to do.