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Everything you need to know. 

The Chicken Doves [Rolling Stone] Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it. Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party’s energies on topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn’t fit Iraq into his busy schedule. “We have the presidential election,” Reid said recently. “Our time is really squeezed.”

Blessed from Below: McCain a True Conservative Says Bush [Breitbart] McCain “is very strong on national defense,” Bush said in an interview taped for airing on “Fox News Sunday.” “He is tough fiscally. He believes the tax cuts ought to be permanent. He is pro-life. His principles are sound and solid as far as I’m concerned.” John McCain is a “true conservative,” President Bush says, although the likely Republican presidential nominee may have to work harder to convince other conservatives that he is one of their own.

796 Insiders May Hold Democrats’ Key [WaPo] For months, Patsy Arceneaux sat on the fence as key aides to the presidential campaigns of Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama made gentle but persistent inquiries. Ann Lewis, a close Clinton adviser, called weekly. The 2004 Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), called, urging her to jump behind Obama. They all wanted to know the same thing: how she planned to vote in her role as a superdelegate at this summer’s national convention.

Cheney Blocking Video-Taped Depositions in Denver Case [C+L] The office of Vice President Dick Cheney is seeking to block the release of videotaped depositions given by two aides who witnessed a physical encounter between an Iraq war opponent and Cheney. In a motion filed Saturday, Cheney’s office contended that the videotapes could be used to invade the privacy and embarrass two aides called to testify about the encounter in a civil lawsuit. The motion for a protective order expressed particular concern that both aides’ faces could wind up on YouTube.com. The plaintiff, Steven Howards of Golden, is suing Secret Service agents who arrested him after he approached Cheney at a Beaver Creek mall in 2006 and told the vice president his policies in Iraq were “disgusting.”

Next up for the Democrats: Civil War! [NYT Op-Ed: F. Rich] WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed? The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.