The Chris Moeller Archives

The next logical step

If you continue to kill other people's children over a long period of time, those people will eventually stop being polite towards you. This is a simple concept to understand. A few months ago, the woman who spearheaded the widespread citizen movement against the Iraq War in the United States, Cindy Sheehan, announced that she was retiring from that movement, having become frustrated with a Democratic-led Congress that has, thus far, defied an electoral mandate to stop the bloody conflict.

Now Sheehan is back, announcing that she will challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her congressional seat in 2008 if the San Francisco Democrat and her caucus don't bring impeachment charges against President Bush before the "Peace Mom's" caravan march from Texas reaches Washington D.C. July 23rd.

Threats and timelines of our own, such as this, have sadly become quite necessary, with the inability of Democrats to end the war being so remarkably perplexing. A USA Today/Gallup Poll today shows opposition to the war reaching a new record high. Bush's approval rating has bottomed out again, this time at 29%. More than 70 percent of Americans believe we should withdraw from Iraq before April, and only one in five Americans believes the increase in U.S. forces in Iraq since January has made the situation there better. Meanwhile, the author of this so-called military "surge" in the region, John McCain, has seen his presidential support even among Republicans wither in the heat of summer.

The presidential candidate of the Democratic establishment, Hillary Clinton, is planning to introduce legislation that would revoke the war authority that Congress originally surrendered to the president in 2002, saying that "the American public and our troops in the field are entitled to a new debate about this war." Wrong. We're entitled to action, not more focus group-driven and hollow debate. The debate has already been waged, and it's now being waged only between the American people and their unrepresentative government. Congressional Democrats have seen their approval rating fall to an almost equally-abysmal 30 percent.

And don't tell me that Democrats have had their hands tied to administration policy on Iraq. Ending the war never required a two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto. All our representatives in Washington had to do during this term was nothing at all. By simply refusing to send any war appropriations bill whatsoever to the White House, our troops would have been forced to stand down in Iraq by now. Since we saw a sharp increase in war spending instead, and because Democrats are still unwilling to spend even the slightest political capital to stop the bloodshed or begin impeachment proceedings against the irresistable force they view as the impediment to progress, the party can expect to see not only an increase in the opposition to incumbency in their state primaries during the winter of 2008, but also, a much larger group of betrayed and disaffected voters abandoning the Dems for third party options like Sheehan, Ralph Nader, or "none of the above"on election day in November.

posted by CM @ 1:26 PM