{"id":126,"date":"2007-01-11T11:50:44","date_gmt":"2007-01-11T15:50:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/11\/brownback-just-lost-my-support\/"},"modified":"2007-02-05T21:10:20","modified_gmt":"2007-02-06T01:10:20","slug":"brownback-just-lost-my-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=126","title":{"rendered":"Brownback just lost my support"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Its bad enough when intellectually vacant Democrats make intellectually vacant statements but when Republicans start doing it. I was reading the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washtimes.com\/national\/20070111-121645-6413r.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Washington Times story<\/a> about Democrats opposing the now-famous SURGE. Things like;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Escalation of this war is not the change the American people called for in the last election,&#8221; Democratic Whip Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois said last night in his party&#8217;s response to Mr. Bush&#8217;s prime-time presentation of his Iraq strategy changes.<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;Instead of a new direction, the president&#8217;s plan moves the American commitment in Iraq in the wrong direction.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, said Americans want to know whether Mr. Bush&#8217;s strategy is a &#8220;change of course.&#8221;<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;Or is this simply more of the same with slightly different rhetoric?&#8221; Mr. Schumer said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And then I ran into this paragraph;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican and a favorite of conservatives, last night said Mr. Bush&#8217;s troop surge is not the answer.<br \/>\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0&#8220;Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution,&#8221; he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, I thought maybe Mr. Brownback had more to say on the subject, because I wasn&#8217;t going to impugn him on a one-line quote in a newspaper article, so I went to <a href=\"http:\/\/brownback.senate.gov\/\" target=\"_blank\">his website<\/a> to see what could be missing from the story. <a href=\"http:\/\/brownback.senate.gov\/pressapp\/record.cfm?id=267419\" target=\"_blank\">I found more<\/a>, well, word-wise but still intellectually vacant;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I do not believe that sending more troops to Iraq is the answer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Brownback. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Iraq requires a political rather than a military solution. In the last two days, I have met with Prime Minister Maliki, with two deputy presidents and the president of the Kurdish region. I came away from these meetings convinced that the United States should not increase its involvement until Sunnis and Shi&#8217;a are more willing to cooperate with each other instead of shooting at each other.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Brownback continued, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Kurdish leadership does not wish to get in the middle of a sectarian fight between the Sunni and Shi\u00e2\u20ac\u2122a, and the United States should not either. Instead of surging troops, we must press the Iraqi government to reach a political solution. We cannot achieve a political solution while a military solution is imposed. The best way to reach a democratic Iraq is to empower the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own nation building.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>He sounds like a Democrat. Where have these people been for the last forty years. People in that part of the world don&#8217;t understand words. They don&#8217;t tell the truth and as soon as your back is turned they&#8217;ll run a dagger through your backside.<\/p>\n<p>The only thing people in that part of the world understand is force. No amount of surrender talk, no amount of concession will yield even a moment&#8217;s respite from the violence there. The people who are killing each other will only stop when they&#8217;re dead, or when they&#8217;re backed into a corner, weaponless\u00c2\u00a0with a bayonet to their throat.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/brownback.senate.gov\/english\/samtravelsto-middleeast-africa-asia.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Brownback is apparently over in the area now and has cutsey blog<\/a> going about all of the people he&#8217;s met and how wonderful they are to him, but I honestly don&#8217;t think he&#8217;s had his eyes open the entire he&#8217;s been there if he can&#8217;t get these notions of negotiation and political solutions out of his head.<\/p>\n<p>Lessons of the past are lost on Presidential candidates I guess. When Saddam Hussein was beaten\u00c2\u00a0soundly in 1991, Yassir Arafat couldn&#8217;t get to the negotiation table fast enough. When Hussein&#8217;s defenses were destroyed again in 2003, Qaddafi couldn&#8217;t surrender his weapons of mass destruction fast enough. When Sadr and Iran meet the same types of defeat, the rest will come along willingly &#8211; maybe fast enough to shut Chavez up for a day or two, as well.<\/p>\n<p>But until Brownback yanks his head from his fourth point-of-contact, he&#8217;ll get no support here from me.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile REAL Republicans like Mitch McConnell are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.breitbart.com\/news\/2007\/01\/11\/D8MJ6MLO0.html\" target=\"_blank\">supporting the President&#8217;s plan<\/a>;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>President Bush&#8217;s decision to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq drew fierce opposition Thursday from congressional Democrats, but the Senate&#8217;s top Republican threatened a filibuster to block any legislation expressing disapproval of the plan.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Obviously, it will &#8230; require 60 votes,&#8221; said <a title=\"You can also highlight word(s) and then shift-click to search.\" style=\"text-decoration: underline\" href=\"http:\/\/search.breitbart.com\/q?s=%22Sen.+Mitch+McConnell%22&#038;sid=breitbart.com\">Sen. Mitch McConnell<\/a>, R-Ky., as senior administration officials made the case for Bush&#8217;s new policy in Congress, at news briefings and the morning television programs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Powerline<\/a> did an interview with McConnell <a href=\"http:\/\/powerlineblog.com\/archives\/016470.php\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Its bad enough when intellectually vacant Democrats make intellectually vacant statements but when Republicans start doing &hellip; <a title=\"Brownback just lost my support\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=126\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Brownback just lost my support<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}