Ace explains how the public declaration of a timetable for withdrawal from a fight with your opponent can give that opponent the upper hand.

He’s talking about the battle between Bush and the Democrats over funding for the Iraq war. Ace quotes this story, which says:

[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi had announced earlier that the House would not leave for the Memorial Day recess without a new funding bill, a signal to some of a looming defeat.

“When they put out that deadline, people realized that we were going to lose,” said an aide to an anti-war lawmaker. “Everything after that seemed like posturing.”

That move gave Bush the upper hand in negotiations, the aide said, since it allowed him to wait out the Democrats . . .

Ace adds:

Their announcement of a timetable for withdrawal from a fight with a patient opponent in the White House having resulted in catastrophic failure, Democrats went on to immediately call anew for a timetable of withdrawal from a fight with a patient opponent in Iraq.

Sometimes irony is just so ironic.

[Posted by WLS]

Supposedly this isn’t “new news” since she has apparently included it as an “aside” in her autobiography, but in Carl Bernstein’s new book on HRC — “A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton” — he speculates that HRC ultimately decided to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton after graduating from Yale because she passed the Arkansas Bar exam, but ……

FAILED THE D.C. BAR EXAM!!!

For you non-lawyers in the blogosphere, the D.C. bar exam is widely regarded as about the easiest exam in the country to pass.

Bernstein says HRC was so embarrassed about her failure that she hid it from close friends for over 30 years.

The Washington Post has a story on Bernstein’s book and a another biography written by two long-time investigative reporters for the NYT.

— WLS

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: Personally, I don’t see failing a bar exam as a big deal, absent some specific reason it’s relevant. But maybe that’s just me. (Despite libelous claims by Joseph Mailander to the contrary, I passed it on the first try, so it’s nothing personal. But if someone else failed, hey — it happens.)