GOP SENATOR: JUNE 30 TOO SOON

Okay, so it's Dick Lugar, who has a penchant for saying this sort of thing first... but often he's the first among the right to actually be right.

Asked on Sunday if the transfer date was unrealistic, Richard Lugar, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC television, "It may be, and I think it's probably time to have that debate."

Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden Jr. of Delaware, both said they had been advised that Bremer would brief them and other legislators this week. Lugar also said he had scheduled three days of hearings, from April 20 to April 22, to explore the details of the transfer.

We'll see how this plays out. Though everything else has been just about fair game, Bush has stuck hard to the 6/30 deadline. Kerry's been attacking the President, saying:

“I think the June 30 deadline is a fiction and they never should have set an arbitrary deadline, which almost clearly has been affected by the election schedule in the United States of America,”

The worse Iraq gets, and the more unrealistic a 6/30 handover seems, the more fair this charge becomes. If they would manipulate the timeline of the 9/11 commission until after the election by stalling it in the vetting process, they could be just as cynical with this. We'll see. We got them to cave and send Condi to the floor, as well as turn over all those witheld Clinton documents, so hopefully they'll budge on this if necessary.