Reply #2: Take small comfort in that... [View All]

[punpirate]

... the vote was 77-23. Twenty-eight Dems voted for it, but twenty-two (and one `pug, Chaffee) voted against it.

But, it's still small comfort. The vote for removing Hussein's army from Kuwait, which had the approval of the UN, was something like 55-45 in the Senate in late 1990, and several of those Senators (about seven or eight) said that the factor that convinced them was the story about Iraqi soldiers throwing hundreds of babies out of incubators, the story that turned out to be false, a concoction of the Kuwaiti government in conjunction with the PR firm, Hill & Knowlton.

You'd think that people who'd been hoodwinked by a Bush once before would have figured it out, but with so much talk about 9/11 being bandied about, they weren't thinking--they only cared about the backlash the right wing could cause in their districts back home if they didn't support the war.

It's a crappy situation--a scared and manipulable public, a cynical representation calculating the truth against the political fallout, and a neo-conservative administration bent on war as the best form of diplomacy.

It won't get better until better candidates surface and people vote for them--until that time, expect more of the same.