A stab in the back
Forget every cautiously optimistic thing I've written this year about the new Democratic-controlled Congress. Push came to shove today, and it turns out we're still dealing with the same bunch of spineless cowards that have been in Washington all along.In direct opposition with the voter mandate in November, a Senate-House conference committee acquiesced to the President today, dropping demands for a timetable on Iraq withdrawal while simultaneously approving a $120 billion supplemental war spending bill.
Instead, the committee has forced the president to accept only benchmarks for progress from the wobbly Iraqi government, and even failures on that front would not legally tie the Bush Administration's purse strings. "I view this as the beginning of the end of the president's policy on Iraq," said Democratic Rep. Rahm Emmanuel of Illinois, and truer words may have never been spoken. It's the Democrats' policy now. It's their war. They just purchased it.
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Update 5/25/07 pm: The final House and Senate tallies are in. Make a note of it. This is why Boswell and Harkin have stopped getting my vote.
posted by CM @ 9:13 PM
2 Comments:
Don’t be too hard on the spineless cowards. Their actions will allow them to hold their majority in the House and Senate and regain the Presidency in 2008. The Republicans received the message in November. The end game started when Rummy left. Look for troops to start coming home by next summer to help the Republicans in the elections as much as possible.
Speaking of cowards, I love this piece from Pat Buchanan accusing Polosi of giving Bush a green light for pre-emptively striking Iran.
TA
I can't envision Congressional Republicans turning on the president any more than I can the Corporate Democrats. Some GOP moderates may be forced to defect in purple districts, but a policy change would necessitate about 17 crossovers in the Senate and 60 in the House. Not too likely.
The Rumsfeld firing, I suspect, wasn't the beginning of an end game, but rather a way to simply shift the blame for Iraq onto the war's execution, and away from the actual worthiness of the mission.
Writer David Mamet put it well a few months ago, in the parlance of poker. In effect, he said, the problem with Bush's Congressional opponents is that they keep calling when they should be raising. Failing to raise the stakes (that is, the Democrats' fear of alienating voters) allows the perpetual raiser (i.e. Bush) to become increasingly bold.
You can't have victory without courage. In poker, a person can sit at the table all night, never bet, and still go broke on just the antes alone. One can either be bold and risk defeat, or do nothing and ensure it.
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