Category: Politics

It reads like a list of usual suspects – seven Republican Senators have threatened to surrender to Democrats on the nonbinding resolution to not support the President’s strategy in Iraq. According to the Washington Post;

In a letter distributed yesterday evening to Senate leaders, John W. Warner (Va.), Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and five other GOP supporters of the resolution threatened to attach their measure to any bill sent to the floor in the coming weeks. Noting that the war is the “most pressing issue of our time,” the senators declared: “We will explore all of our options under the Senate procedures and practices to ensure a full and open debate.”

The other 5 usual suspects;

The other Republican senators who signed the letter were Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, Norm Coleman (Minn.), Gordon Smith (Ore.), and George V. Voinovich (Ohio).

I’ll tell ya what, I’m so tired of hearing Hagel, Collins, Snowe and Voinovich standing in the way of every traditionally Republican vote in the Senate from tax cuts to this nonbinding resolution, I hope the party throws them under the bus in their next bid for reelection. Does anyone really miss Lincoln Chaffee? I don’t.

Of course the letter came out yesterday afternoon after Chief of Staff General Peter Pace said this according to Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times;

“From the standpoint of the troops, I believe that they understand how our legislature works and that they understand that there’s going to be this kind of debate,” said Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, effectively taking out of play an argument that had been made by Mr. Bush’s spokesman and other top Republicans, who had warned resolutions disagreeing with the troop increase plan would send bad signals.
    Joining Gen. Pace in testifying to the House Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the troops are “sophisticated enough to understand” that the debate is about a way to move forward in Iraq.
    But Gen. Pace said that would all change if today’s nonbinding resolutions turned into moves to cut off funding for the war effort — something some Democrats have proposed.

So knowing those RINOs, they took that as signal to start leveraging their usually insignificant stature in the Senate. Political opportunists. Maybe they all need to come out of the closet.

And all the while, Pelosi is still worrying about her free airplane.

Despite the fact that tax cuts have played a huge part in strengthening our post-9/11 economy (just try to imagine the growth of the economy over the last six years if we hadn’t had to fight terrorists), Democrats are coming for our earnings.

Steven Dinan in the Washington Times tells us;

Democrats said President Bush’s new budget is a “missed opportunity” to find common ground, but they are left with few good alternatives other than tax increases if they hope to boost spending and match the president’s goal of balancing the budget by 2012.

Some economists (like Larry Kudlow) think that the budget will be balanced by 2009 if the economy continues at it’s current rate because of increased revenues. Even the Congressional Budget Office projects a decrease in budget shortfall;

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office yesterday said if Congress passes the new war-spending bill for 2007, but does not otherwise increase spending before October, the deficit will drop to about $200 billion this fiscal year. That’s down from the actual 2006 deficit of $248 billion, and lower than the administration’s $244 billion projection for this year.

Of course, the Washington Post sees children starving and the elderly living on the street;

The $2.9 trillion budget blueprint contains little to appeal to, but much to infuriate, the Democratic majority, Democrats said. In a series of hearings, they rattled off a list of their objections: More than $100 billion to be sliced from projected Medicare and Medicaid spending. Further restrictions on the federal food-stamp program. Insufficient cash to maintain health coverage for millions of children. And deep cuts proposed for a range of programs that help communities put police on the street and fund community projects.

And Charlie Rangel, always the poster child for bipartisanship;

“They’re playing politics at a time that I’m trying to be bipartisan,” Rangel said later. “I don’t think that I can tell the president what to put on the table and not to put on the table. But I can tell him: Don’t pick a . . . fight.”

And from the WashTimes story;

“It sounds to me like this is pre-campaign talk,” Mr. Rangel said of Mr. Bush’s call to make the tax cuts permanent. “I just want someone at the White House to know that Democrats won and we want to work with Republicans.”

We’ll do so much better with this year’s budget because there are no earmarks;

Stepping out from behind the lectern and hefting a foot-thick stack of congressional reports, which Congress uses to attach add-ons to spending bills, Mr. Bush challenged lawmakers to drop most pork-barrel spending projects called earmarks. 

And Joe Lieberman thinks that we should all do our part in the War Against Terror by paying higher taxes;

 “People keep saying that we’re not asking sacrifice of anybody but our military in this war, and some civilians who are working on it,” said Mr. Lieberman, a former Democrat who supports the war in Iraq. “When you put together the [Department of Defense] budgets with Homeland Security budgets, we need to ask people to help us in a way that they know when they pay more it will go for their security.” 

That’s just specious. If the CBO says we’re coming in $200 billion under budget, why are Democrats scrambling to raise taxes? Because they want more porkbarrel spending to solidify their hold on their ample, straining seats. Just once I’d like to see a Democrat find a way to balance the budget without taking money out of my dusty pockets. Just once. Why do they think that “fiscal responsibility” means curtailing my personal spending and increasing theirs?

And we already know how Pelosi stands on budget restraint since she’s still pushing for her own private government-sponsored jet.
 

I’m watching Fox news Sunday’s Chris Wallace interviewing turncoat professional backbiter Jim Webb. When confronted with his 1985 quote “The lesson I took away from Vietnam was that you can’t debate a war while you’re fighting it”, Webb sputtered that what he’s doing today does not contrast with his current behavior; “When do we debate this? 20 years from now?” That’s a disingenuous question. Period.

Webb knows, and anyone being rational knows, that the Left’s current behavior is encouraging our enemies in the Middle East. Is it any wonder that two massive explosions rocked Baghdad just a week after “tens of thousands” marched in Washington last weekend?

Webb then went on to deny that he was comparing Viet Nam to the war in Iraq by comparing his experiences in Viet Nam to Iraq. In advocating a diplomatic solution to Iraq’s war, he claimed that China’s involvement in the Vietnam didn’t exclude them from being a solution to the end of our participation in Viet Nam.

Anyone who has spent more than a minute studing the Vietnam War knows that China and Vietnam were enemies. Vietnam was a client of the Soviet Union who was also an historical enemy of the Chinese. Nixon exploited the mistrust between the Soviet Union and China to limit Soviet support of the North Vietnamese.Need proof?? Who was it that, by military force, ended Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in the early 1980s? Who was it that checked Vietnam’s expansionist policies in the Far East? It was China, in case you hadn’t guessed it by now. A better comparison would be our outreach to Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, than to Iran and Syria.

Webb went on to claim that Syria and Iran weren’t really allies. Which explains why Hezbollah, a client organization of Syria, was firing Iranian-made missiles into Israel last summer.

If this is an example of the tone of the debate we’re going to see over the next year-and-a-half, conservaives can rest assured that we’ll win the White House in 2008. Webb is being intentionally disingenuous because of the inconvenience of his own words.

Personally, I hope we see more of this;

But this illustrates what the President meant yesterday when he said this war is sapping our national soul; the extent to to which the Left has to lie to justify it’s anti-war position is costing us dearly.

The Left, and Webb is the posterchild of the extremist Left, has reached the point where they are really no longer useful in a thoughtful and genuine discussion of the issues we face in this new millenium. Their politics are rooted in failed policy and a distorted version of history. Their hearts are blackened with their culture of personality over service to the People.

The wrangling over the means-nothing nonbinding resolution in the Senate to condemn the President for giving the troops what they need to fight and win has reached the level of “disgusting” according to Jim DeMint;

“This resolution is a resolution of defeat and disgrace,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican who, as a member of the House, voted in 2002 for the war.

John Cornyn, Texas Republican explained it best yesterday;

“We can’t claim to support the troops and not support their mission,” he said in a floor speech yesterday. “If we don’t support the mission, we shouldn’t be passing nonbinding resolutions. We should be doing everything in our power to stop it.”
    Instead, Mr. Cornyn said, “we should send them the message that, yes, we believe you can succeed and it’s important to our national security that you do.” He has been drawing up a resolution to do that.

But then we get faux-war hero Tom Harkin with his overpriced 2 cents;

“That’s just nonsense,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, who voted for the war in 2002. “What undermines the troops is keeping them fighting in a civil war, to keep them fighting for a mistake.”

What undermines the troops is criticising their mission and allowing Iraq to fall into the same hole as Somalia, Haiti and Viet Nam. Where did Harkin stand on Haiti? That was a mess.

If we can’t find some more Senators like Cornyn with a fricken backbone, who’ll admit that there’s more at stake here than keeping political campaign promises to a bunch of pussies who don’t recognize that this more than just a civil war. 

Iraq IS the War on Terror. Period. Iran was the enemy in 2001 and they’re STILL the enemy. And anyone who can’t see that Iran is using Iraq as a sort of proxy war is blind, deaf and intentionally ignorant. And disgusting.

According to the Washington Post, Democrats and RINOs united behind Virginia’s Warner last night;

Democratic and Republican opponents of President Bush’s troop-buildup plan joined forces last night behind the nonbinding resolution with the broadest bipartisan backing: a Republican measure from Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced the shift, hoping to unite a large majority of the Senate and thwart efforts by the White House and GOP leaders to derail any congressional resolution of disapproval of Bush’s decision to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq by 21,500.

Although the original Democratic language was popular within the party, it had little appeal among Republicans. Warner’s proposal drew support from both sides, and it was retooled last night to maximize both Democratic and Republican votes.

The revised resolution would express the Senate’s opposition to the troop increase but would vow to protect funding for the troops. The resolution does not include the Democratic language saying the Bush plan is against the national interest, but it also drops an earlier provision by Warner suggesting Senate support for some additional troops.

Still disgusting. We all know what it means regardless of what the resolution says. Republicans, if they had gonad between them, should have stood back and let the Democrats write and pass any resolution they want – and live with the political fallout.

I can’t get over the fact that Republicans still have the idea that they can “get along” with Democrats – especially in the Senate. Must be a character flaw.

Two stories this morning, one by Charles Hurt in the Washington Times, the other by Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray in the Washington Post are reporting on the absolute cowardice in Congress.

Hurt recounts how Senators who were for the surge are suddenly against it;

“We don’t have enough troops in Iraq,” Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, said in 2005.
    In 2004, he told NBC’s Tim Russert some things he believes “very deeply.”
    “Number one, we cannot fail,” Mr. Kerry said. “I’ve said that many times. And if it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos, that can provide the groundwork for other countries, that’s what we have to do.”

Now, Joe Biden;

 In June 2005, he said, “There’s not enough force on the ground now to mount a real counterinsurgency.”
    “They’re going to need a surge of forces,” he said in another interview.
    By last week, Mr. Biden had reversed his war strategy.
    “The president and others who support the surge have it exactly backwards,” he told reporters.

Linguine-spined Harry Reid;

“If it is for a surge — that is, two or three months and it’s part of a program to get us out of there as indicated by this time next year — then sure I’ll go along with it,” said the Nevada Democrat who voted for the war in 2002. “If the commanders on the ground said this was just for a short period of time, we’ll go along with that.”
    After Mr. Bush laid out his plan to increase troops, the Democratic leader flatly rejected it.
    “The surge is a bad idea,” Mr. Reid said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Of course, the Washington Post, in keeping with it’s unwritten editorial policy of focusing on rifts among Republicans titles their piece “For GOP, Discord In Dissent on Iraq”, but the misleading title leads to a story about Republicans scrambling to come together with Democrats in a way that would support the “surge”. Oh, yeah they mention a couple of the “usual suspects” like Specter, Snowe, Sununu who are doing their best to act like Democrats all of the time, but generally their are comments like this;

“The worst thing would be for the Senate by 60 votes to express disapproval of a mission we are sending people to lay down their lives for,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), a member of the Republican leadership.

I understand that Republicans are trying to waterdown the nonbinding resolution, but they ought to just let the Democrats write the whole damn thing and vote a partyline vote against it and let the Democrats stand there with egg on their stupid ghastly faces when “the surge” is successful.

Democrats, who are united in their desire to stop the escalation, are regarding the Republican divisions with some glee. “You cannot have a resolution that is both meaningless and undercuts the troops. That’s impossible. Their position is totally inconsistent,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), a member of the House Democratic leadership.

Let them be gleeful for now. As long as they suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome, let them party their stupid asses off for two years. They’ll look like idiots the day after the election.

 

  

According to AP (by way of Fox News Channel), Arlen Specter (R-INO) is challenging the President’s decision-making powers;

“I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider,” Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Congress’ war powers amid an increasingly harsh debate over Iraq war policy. “The decider is a shared and joint responsibility,” Specter said.

I would suggest to Mr. Specter that he read Section 2 of Article II of the Constitution, whereas;

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices….

And when he gets done reading it, he can pass it on to Russ Feingold;

“The Constitution makes Congress a coequal branch of government. It’s time we start acting like it,” said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., who is chairing a hearing Tuesday on Congress’ war powers and forwarding legislation to eventually prohibit funding for the deployment of troops to Iraq.

It doesn’t say a word in Constitution about Congress having war powers (Article I), short of cutting off funding. So if thats what he wants to do, do it already. Show your true colors – shit or get off the pot.