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interventional radiology and cancer care. More information at www.wholidem.org. From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Bob Garfield is out this week.

I'm Mike Pasca. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. More kidnappings, more killings this week in Iraq.

But the skirmishes that received the most coverage were on Capitol Hill.

Emboldened by last week's overwhelming rejection of an amendment sponsored by John Kerry,

calling for a timetable for a pullout from Iraq,

Republicans went on the offensive, deriding Democrats for defeatism and disunity.

On Thursday, the Senate soundly defeated two other proposals for troop withdrawal, and through it all, one phrase anchored the Republican message.

When it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern, a cutting and running.

And they're advocating a policy called cut and run.

We can't just sit here and wave the white flag, that we can't cut and run.

By the way, I just want to know whether Senator Frist has any other words that he knows but cut and run.

It's probably safe to say that not since the 1700s when cut and run was coined as a command for sailors to slash the anchor line and run a ship before the wind, has the phrase been invoked so often.

And its ubiquity prompted Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank to file a piece for Wednesday's paper headlined,

...