Politics & Power Quote by Kit Bond

Bond’s sentence is built like a verbal sandbag wall: stack enough clauses and you can slow the flood of doubt long enough to make “withdrawal” sound like sabotage. The intent is less to argue policy than to police the boundaries of acceptable dissent. By quoting “the insurgents themselves,” he borrows the enemy’s voice as a prosecutorial witness, turning Democratic calls for a timetable into evidence that America is about to hand the opposition a psychological win.

The subtext is classic wartime rhetoric: time is a weapon, and only one side should be allowed to wield it. If “time is working against them,” then the U.S. merely has to keep doing what it’s doing. A timetable becomes not a planning tool but a concession. That framing implicitly equates domestic debate with battlefield advantage, a move designed to make hesitation feel disloyal and to cast political opponents as naively helping the enemy “undercut momentum.”

Context matters: this is the post-2003 Iraq war argument over whether to set a withdrawal schedule, when “momentum” and “turning corners” were the currency of administration-aligned messaging. Bond’s language leans on the malleability of “momentum” (a term that can’t be audited) and the moral gravity of “insurgents.” It’s a rhetorical jujitsu: cite the enemy’s pessimism as proof of progress, then warn that your own colleagues threaten to reverse it. The sentence reads like an attempt to freeze time politically, insisting that the only responsible timeline is none at all.