http://us.f816.mail.yahoo.com/ym/ShowLetter?Idx=&Search=&YY=67756&y5beta=yes&order=&sort=Somebody needs to write the sequel to John Kennedy’s “Profiles In Courage”. Let’s call it “Profiles In Cowardice”. I know a really, really good case study for Chapter One. This week... the leadership of the Democratic Party wrote Chapter One of “Profiles In Cowardice”. Of course, that wasn’t entirely a surprise. Most Democrats bought into this war, along with the rest of Bushism, from the very beginning. It turns out that this gang of mealy-mouthed nothing-burgers really is the party of effete Quislings that Republicans make them out to be. At a time of moral, constitutional, international, governmental, political and environmental crisis, the Democrats have taken a firm stand on the issue of trying not to offend anybody in America. And, of course, getting themselves reelected....At least you can’t say that they have no principles. And at least you can’t say that they’re inconsistent. They never fail to fail. And they never disappoint while disappointing.
But what marks out the most recent act of shame is the sheer egregiousness of it. In 2002, Karl Rove arranged a congressional vote on the Iraq war resolution right before midterm elections. That alone was the height of political cynicism on his part, showing that nothing was beyond politicizing by the Bush administration. It was only one year after 9/11 (which history may yet show to itself have been the greatest act of political cynicism ever, or ever imaginable), Bush was riding high, people were scared, war seemed to many like an appropriate policy, and an Iraq marketing campaign of which Madison Avenue must have been in awe was in full swing. There was no excuse, even under such circumstances, for Democrats like Clinton, Edwards and the rest to vote for the war. Yet, you could at least understand why they did. You could partially excuse them if you were so inclined (I wasn’t), precisely because of the outrageousness of the situation they were placed in by regressive forces inside and out of the White House. Heck, you could even argue that they were fulfilling their role as faithful representatives of their constituents’ will, even as they were abdicating their responsibilities as leaders of those same citizens.
But this... This there is no excuse for. Not now, not ever. This is precisely the inverse of the situation in 2002, which makes it mind-boggling to contemplate just what would be required for Harry Reid to close the sale here. Just what is necessary for the Democratic leadership to acquire the political courage for doing what was the morally correct thing from the very beginning?
.......
Bush desperately needed this bill. No more money, no more war. Congress did not. That means that the Democrats should have simply kept sending him the money, with their conditions attached, and let him continue to veto it. It was a perfectly viable strategy, and for once the conditions were all in their favor. Bush could not have kept vetoing war funding legislation with a popular provision attached to end the deployment while plausibly arguing that Democrats were not supporting the troops. This would have been particularly true if the Democrats had stood up every once in a while and explained themselves to an American public already sympathetic to their position. They could have turned the White House public relations strategy right on its head, and they even had the help of reality to assist them in doing so. All they had to do was say “We keep sending him the money, and he keeps rejecting it. We call on him now to sign this crucial legislation necessary to fund our troops in the field”. They could also have further painted him as petulant, arrogant, intransigent and childish (who, George W. Bush? – imagine that!) for being willing to sign only his particular version of the funding bill. How hard a sell would that be?
But maybe what the Democrats needed, finally, was an adversary who folds when pressed. Was that the problem? The truth is that is exactly what Bush is, as the Wolfowitz affair demonstrated again, and as has been shown often enough before, perhaps most notably in the UN Security Council when he yanked his DOA Iraq invasion resolution just days after the bluff in which he promised there would be a vote no matter what. This guy is the ultimate coward acting the part of the playground bully. Stand up to him and he collapses. How many of Bush’s eight years have to go by before Democrats learn to stop flinching? Granted, Iraq is different, and at first appearances would seem to be the one thing the Bush camp would never negotiate. But, let’s face it, the truth is that Bush is just waiting for another president to hand the war off to so that he can delude himself into believing that he didn’t lose it. If that’s the mentality, he might even secretly welcome a congressional funding cut-off to get it over with earlier rather than later, and still have someone else to blame.
...The Democrats could not possibly be more deluded about what they’ve done, and that is the most charitable definition. Far more likely is that they’ve simply learned well at the School of Rove, and believe they can fool the public too, just like the Big Liars. Harry Reid dropped jaws all across America when he exclaimed, “I don't think there's any way you can stretch what we've done in this supplemental as a defeat. Look how far we've come. … Nobody can say with any veracity that we haven't made progress. Even with the Warner language, the president is conceding to 18 benchmarks and two reporting requirements.”
This puts Americans in a real quandary. Somebody once said: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Interestingly, it wasn’t Karl Marx or even Jane Fonda. It was Jack Kennedy. I think he meant it as a warning for the reactionary right of his time, who could only envision more and more militarism as the sum total of US policy in Latin America. Today, it reads to me like an entirely apt warning for us here at home. And why shouldn’t it, discouraging as the comparison may be, given that this president has been busy turning America into a banana republic?...It’s absurd and it’s tragic that the Democrats will not touch Bush, Cheney or Gonzales, but this week’s caving on funding for the Iraq war is in a league by itself. When they took over Congress, these guys had just one thing they needed to get right. They didn’t. They had a moral responsibility to end a war which they’ve long known, and which Harry Reid has even publicly admitted, is lost. They wouldn’t. They had virtually all the right political conditions in their favor, from a public mandate to a despised president for a political opponent. Still, they couldn’t.
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