On CNN‘s Situation Room on Tuesday, Wolf Blitzer asked Nancy Pelosi about Democrats’ failure to do anything constructive to bring the Iraq war to an end. She tried to shelter behind Republican obstructionism in the Senate, as if people haven’t been asking for months why Democrats don’t simply make continued funding for the war conditional on a meaningful withdrawal plan. He asked the obvious follow-up. If her reply means anything at all, please let me know, because to me it is pure distilled gobbledygook:

BLITZER: Let’s talk about the war in Iraq. When you became speaker, you said bringing the war to an end is my highest priority as speaker. Now, you’ve been speaker now for nine months. The war, if anything, is not only continuing but it’s expanding. There are more troops now in Iraq than there were when you became the speaker. What are you going to do about that?

PELOSI: Well, what we did when we took office. We took the majority here. We changed the debate on the war. We put a bill on the president’s desk that said that we wanted the redeployment of troops out of Iraq to begin in a timely fashion and to end within a year. The president vetoed that bill. He got quite a response to that veto and the Republicans in the Senate then decided that he was never going to get a bill on his desk again, so we have a barrier. And it’s important for the American people to know that while I can bring a bill to the floor in the House, it cannot be brought up in the Senate unless there is a 60 vote.

BLITZER: But you could in the House of Representatives use your power of the purse, the money, just to stop funding the war if you really wanted to.

PELOSI: I wish the speaker had all the power you just described. I certainly could do that. That doesn’t bar the minority from bringing up a funding resolution. They have their parliamentary prerogatives, as well.

I still cannot believe that Wolf Blitzer meekly accepted that non-answer.

Until Pelosi and Reid grow a spine on the subject of using war funding as a policy-change weapon, there’s going to be zero change in direction in the Iraq war. And there’s zero sign of Pelosi and Reid growing said spine. This is despite all the polls which clearly indicate that Americans strongly support using war funding to force Bush to start withdrawing from Iraq.

There is only one way all this makes sense. No matter what Pelosi or Reid or any other Democratic leader says, bringing the war to an end is nobody’s highest priority. It’s not even a kinda sorta high priority. They just like to talk about it. No one has the slightest intention of actually doing anything meaningful.

And anyone who has ever harbored hopes of seeing any meaningful legislative action to hasten the end of the Iraq war is the kind of certifiable lunatic that I used to be till very recently.