I’m very happy that the Congress voted, 246 to 182, to denounce Bush’s troop escalation in Iraq. While on one hand the vote is troubling in that it’s merely symbolic when something very real needs to be done, it’s heartening to see an institutional rebuke of a commander in chief whose bungling has passed beyond the tragic into the obscene.

Looking a couple years ahead, the vote is a train wreck for Republicans. Because the vote divided along partisan lines, with only 17 Republicans abandoning the president, it positions the Republican party squarely in the pro-war camp. Yet the 2006 mid terms made voters’ feelings abundantly clear. We do not want this war. (You know there’s rage when incumbent Republicans are defeated in Missouri and Montana).

And still this week most of the Congressional Republicans refused to vote to oppose a troop surge. It’s like their hearing aids are turned off.

But the people won’t stand for it. There are a lot of tears in small towns and big cities across America, all those lost young men and women. In 2008, after two more years of this, anything labeled Republican will be in deep trouble.

Remarkably, John Boehner, the Republican minority leader, stood up after the vote and proclaimed, “Republicans may have lost the vote on this nonbinding resolution. But we won the debate.”

Yeah, tell yourself that. But it sounds like the captain of the Titanic saying “The ship might be at the bottom of the ocean, but we stuck to our course.”