The tabloid headline I want to see tomorrow is GEORGE, DO SOMETHING. The words should be wrapped around a photo of a president with a trapped, defensive look on his face. GEORGE, SO SOMETHING or maybe RUMMY, DO SOMETHING.

New Yorkers will recognize the allusion. DAVE, DO SOMETHING was a tabloid headline after a particularly nasty run of violent crime during the mayoralty of David Dinkins. The headline wasn’t really a plea -- it was really a verdict: Dinkins, we’re getting killed and you’re not doing a damn thing.

Well, people are getting killed in Iraq -- fifteen soldiers today in the shootdown of the Chinook and three soldiers elsewhere -- and, in the short term at least, it looks as if Bush and Rummy aren’t doing a damn thing. Manana, they tell us, there’ll be a drawdown of U.S. forces, to be replaced by eager young Iraqis ... but what about now? Where’s the sense of urgency? Someone needs to ask these guys point blank: Is there nothing you can do right now to lessen the bloodshed, to win this war we were told was won six months ago?

Of course, the image of the Bushies as manly men of action is still so deeply ingrained that an alternate impression of them can’t seem to take hold -- that they’re people who don’t grasp the seriousness of the situation and thus won’t rouse themselves to make significant changes to a strategy that’s a dismal failure. That has to change.

Oh, and by the way, why haven't numerous Democratic members of Congress, and all the Democratic presidential candiates, called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld? If yesterday this might not have seemed to some like a reasonable reaction to the failures of the past six months, today it seems utterly sensible. Our soldiers are dying because we haven't had enough troops to secure the weapons caches and secure the peace in general, and Rumsfeld muleheadedly refuses to alter the strategy a whit. He should be called to account for that.

Please, folks, for once in your lives set the terms of the debate. Say it: Rumsfeld must go.