Listen to leftist Democrats and they're screaming less about how better to prosecute the terror war broadly and in Iraq, than about the need to bring the boys home - all the while demanding yet more explanation as to why the administration sent Americans overseas in the first place. Comparisons to Vietnam mount. Halliburton is the old kid on the block to kick around, and the Downing Street Memo the new. The Kennedy coterie calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's removal and repeats in the public ear, quagmire, quagmire, quagmire.

Oh, and Abu Ghraib was a torture chamber and Guantanamo is part of a gulag reminiscent of the Holocaust - or something.

Over at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, suggesting a lopsided leftism in public-affairs programming at PBS and NPR - bias and imbalance as obvious as a mallet in the face - takes a fusillade of withering fire and charges of "partisanship" for daring to bring the subject up. Sixteen Democratic senators, evidently seeing no disconnect in the planet's freest society annually providing many millions of taxpayer dollars for government radio and television, demand the president fire the offending chairman.

With her comments championing the rights of Middle Eastern women, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice elicits from radical feminists cavernous yawns and hardly a cheer.

Tax Code overhaul and simplification, high on Bush's second-term domestic agenda, languish undiscussed and indefinitely postponed.

Social Security reform has rolled to a dead stop. The Democrats offer no cooperation, will not even talk about it, provide no ideas of their own. The Republicans, seeing no road to substantive Social Security reform, begin fashioning an exit strategy from the box in which they find themselves.

If the Democratic purpose is to deny the Republicans and the administration as many successes as possible, then the ideologized partisans on the left are daily demonstrating their considerable aptitude.

President Bush terms it "the path of obstruction, the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock." And:

One approach (to government) is to lead, to focus on the people's business, to take on the tough problems . . . .

The other approach is to simply do nothing, to delay solutions, obstruct progress, refuse to take responsibility. Members of the other party have worked with us to achieve important reforms on some issues, yet too often their leadership prefers to block the ideas of others.

We hear "no" to making tax relief permanent, we hear "no" to Social Security reform, we hear "no" to confirming federal judges, we hear "no" to a highly qualified U.N. ambassador, we hear "no" to medical-liability reform. On issue after issue, they stand for nothing except obstruction.

If leaders of the other party have innovative ideas, let's hear them. But if they have no ideas or policies except obstruction, they should step aside and let others lead.

Unless, that is, they are doggedly trudging the road not toward bipartisan achievement but toward Republican failure - and national drift.