{"id":480,"date":"2007-07-09T14:01:41","date_gmt":"2007-07-09T18:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/09\/what-is-a-bi-partisan-strategy\/"},"modified":"2007-07-09T14:01:41","modified_gmt":"2007-07-09T18:01:41","slug":"what-is-a-bi-partisan-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=480","title":{"rendered":"What is a bi-partisan strategy?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still trying to catch up on news and the idiocy that seems to have permeated the District of Columbia while I was gone (only three days, f&#8217;pete&#8217;s sake), so excuse me if this old news to you. In the Wall Street Journal&#8217;s Editorial column today, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB118393582794360370.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks\" target=\"_blank\">Republican Retreat<\/a>&#8220;, they quoted Dick Lugar;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I do not doubt the assessments of military commanders that there has been some progress in security,&#8221; Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared on the Senate floor late last month. But that didn&#8217;t stop Mr. Lugar from concluding that its chances of success are &#8220;very limited.&#8221; Why? The &#8220;short period framed by our own domestic political debate&#8221; won&#8217;t allow it, he says. Instead, Mr. Lugar wants a &#8220;sustainable bipartisan strategy&#8221; along the lines recommended in November by the Iraq Study Group. Last week, New Mexico&#8217;s Pete Domenici noisily joined this bandwagon, as have several other Republican Senators, some of whom face tough re-election fights next year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>All of this nuanced language is just goofy posturing. What the hell is a &#8220;sustainable bipartisan strategy&#8221;? That&#8217;s just buffoonery &#8211; you either win or you lose, you either have a strategy to win, or you have a losing strategy. You can&#8217;t have it both ways.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s no compromising on strategy to please a political base &#8211; the political base aren&#8217;t interested in the particulars of fighting wars and they wouldn&#8217;t know a battle formation from an SOS breakfast.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why our founding fathers didn&#8217;t make Congress the Commanders-in-Chief &#8211; they just hand out the money. You can&#8217;t fight wars in Committee. Look how long it&#8217;s taken for Congress just to come up with a defense bill. Imagine how long wars would take if the military had to wait for Congress to make a decision about tactics or strategy.<\/p>\n<p>So what if Lugar, Domenici and the unnnamed ones are in a political battle? Will\u00c2\u00a0any of them be killed as a result? But, in the meantime, how many of our troops are dying because their political posturing rewards every bullet the bad guys fire at them?<\/p>\n<p>For once,\u00c2\u00a0just once, I want to see a politician put the country and the folks fight for them ahead of their political careers.<\/p>\n<p>The WSJ concludes;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As for Mr. Lugar&#8217;s bipartisan hope, it would be wonderful to think that Washington could come together around a sustainable, long-term Iraq strategy. But how many Democrats are ready to work with Mr. Bush on that? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid now calls ending the war his &#8220;moral&#8221; obligation &#8212; as if America&#8217;s departure would end anything &#8212; and he responded to Mr. Domenici&#8217;s statement by saying GOP Senators must now vote for a rapid withdrawal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Democrats don&#8217;t want to end the war before next November any-damn-way &#8211; They need the issue for the election. And Harry Reid wouldn&#8217;t know a moral obligation if it bit his hip pocket.\u00c2\u00a0Apparently, Lugar and Domenici suffer from the same affliction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m still trying to catch up on news and the idiocy that seems to have permeated &hellip; <a title=\"What is a bi-partisan strategy?\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=480\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What is a bi-partisan strategy?<\/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":[8,5,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-politics","category-society","category-terror-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","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=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}