Birth of "Slow Bleed"

Anyone who has spent time reading or watching political developments in Washington in the last few weeks knows that it's been impossible to avoid the phrase Slow Bleed. Republicans have fallen madly in love with the phrase to describe Congressman Jack Murtha's (D-Pa.) proposal to slowly draw down U.S. troop levels in Iraq.

It has died down a bit as of late, but I heard Senator Trent Lott use it on Face the Nation last Sunday.

Where does the phrase come from? One place where it doesn't originate - any Congressional Democat, in either House of Congress.

Yet, Republicans have been quick to adopt it as their own, incessantly describing Murtha's plan as Slow Bleed whenever given the chance.

I've seen John Boehner, Trent Lott and other prominent Republicans use it on TV to the point of triteness. My favorite example was one South Carolina Republican Congressman, Johnny Iforgethisname, use Slow Bleed in a sentence, saying "quote" before and after the term, as if a Democrat had said it.

Arrrrrrnnnnnnnnt!

The Republicans got busted again, and they got busted by none other than the originator of the phrase himself.

The phrase Slow Bleed comes from a political blog that's been getting a lot of attention lately, and it isn't Count Me Blue. It's Politico. And this isn't a rumor, it's a fact. How do I know that? Because Politico's editor, John Harris, a WaPo veteran, has said as much.

A few days after high-profile, broken-record Republicans began publicly using the term, Harris ran a mea culpa of sorts on Politico's Website. It read:

That's where I come in. "Slow bleed" is my phrase. Murtha had nothing to do with it. Neither did John Bresnahan, the reporter whose name was on the Politico story in which the "slow-bleed strategy" made its debut.

You can understand my pride of authorship. Editors labor in obscurity. Our job is to keep reporters from looking bad, and to let them take the credit when they look good. Rarely is there tangible evidence that we are having any impact. But in 20-plus years in the business, I can scarcely recall an instance when words typed on my keyboard have had such a loud and immediate echo. [Emphasis mine]

Harris wrote that the phrase was nothing more than a fix for flat prose in a draft of a story about Murtha's plan:

We rushed the patient to the operating table for emergency surgery. With VandeHei hovering over my shoulder, this is what I came up with:

"Top House Democrats, working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and instead will pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options."

That is not exactly prize-winning prose, but it seemed a little snappier to us -- and more on point. Please note the context: What is slowly bleeding away is the administration's political support to keep fighting the war. Republicans pounced on the phrase because of the ease with which that context could be shorn away, to give the impression that what Democrats were slow-bleeding were the bodies of troops in Iraq.

That willingness to wrest words from context -- and to attribute the phrase to Democrats even though it was not theirs -- was demagogic on the part of Republican operatives. But it was never my plan to make their work so easy.

In the words of Attytood's Will Bunch, "You might think [Slow Bleed] came straight from the war room of the Republican National Committee."

It's delightful to see Congressional Republicans finally doing something in a timely manner for a change. Too bad what they're in a rush to do is using a derogatory term to conjure up unpleasant images of our troops wounded in battle while trying to tie it to Democrats. When the GOP was in power, if it would have been a little quicker to stop, or investigate or at least question President Bush, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in.