A roundup of last night’s panel on Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On Iraq—

MORT KONDRACKE: [The Democrats] don’t have a plan. There are plans all over the place. There’s the Kerry-Dean-Pelosi-Murtha plan which is an immediate beginning of withdrawals and everybody out within a certain time. Nancy Pelosi said all out by the end of 2007. Kerry has said out within a year, which is the about — punch line, the same thing. . . .
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I think when the president says this is the cut and run, he’s wrong. This is worse than cut and run. What Dean and Kerry are proposing is to arbitrarily drawdown the troops. Dean talks about the Reserve and the Guard, regardless of its effect on Iraq, on our strategy on Iraq and even though the remaining troops — American troops are in Iraq.
. . . Maliki knows that the Americans are not going to stay there forever. And what we ought to do, rather than argue about troop levels, is to try and see if we can change his government, either leaving him at the head or somebody else, so you remove the elements who are restraining him from doing what he has to do. . . . if you’re going to announce a withdrawal, nothing is going to happen. It’ll make it a lot worse.

—On Gay Marriage and the Elections—

MARA LIASSON: . . . I think this is one of those things, late in the campaign, that can have an effect. I don’t think it is a seismic effect, but . . . there is an amendment on the ballot [in Virginia] — [Allen] badly needs to energize his conservative base, he’s running neck-and-neck with this complete neophyte under-funded opponent, Jim Webb, who, by the way, says he’s also — believes that marriage should be against one man, one woman.
KRAUTHAMMER: I don’t think it’s going to have an effect in Tennessee because, Ford, the Democrat who’s a moderate, is against gay marriage and in favor of the Constitutional amendment, so he’s covered on that. And it’s not going to have an effect in New Jersey either because of the incredibly clever and political way in which this court wrote its opinion. It essentially left it open . . .
But the real scandal is how do you get the courts ordering the legislature to do this? We’re the only country in the West — I mean, what we’re doing here is exactly what happened on abortion where a court decided, and take it off the table of the other institutions of our Democracy.