Republicide Revisited
That moniker does have a history in my writings. The first time I used it was during the 1996 GOP primaries when every Pachyderm presidential pretender morphed into born-again Democrats at the prospect of a Reagan Republican (in the person of Steve Forbes) entering the race and threatening to make the contest about ideas and optimism and prosperity and growth instead of...well, nothing, really. The spectacle of RINOs sounding like Democrats to kick to death a genuine conservative, thus ensuring that whoever emerged from that fratricidal scrum would be easy pickings for President Pants-Around-The-Ankles, was so garishly demoralizing that it really should have cured me of any lingering delusion that Mr. Bill was going to be denied a second term.
I take this stroll down memory lane because it looks increasingly clear that, equivalently speaking, history is destined to repeat itself. Only this time, like a long train, the coming...well, train wreck, started slow and is slowly but steadily building up an unstoppable momentum.
That start came with the McCain Mutiny back before Memorial Day. Then, several months later there arrived the Second Louisiana Purchase following Hurricane Katrina, in which we were treated to brain farts like once and future House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's oblivious declaration that all the federal spending that could be cut had been cut and they couldn't cuts no more, which gave a whole new meaning to the expression "big boned." A month after that came the baffling Harriet Miers experiment.
The merciful withdrawal of the White House counsel and her replacement with Judge Samuel Alito, coupled with a renewed fiscal hawkishness, the fizzling of "Plamegate," and the hideously belated GOP push-back on the Dems' rehashed "BUSH LIED!!!!" gambit, seemed to signal a turning of the corner, and end to majority fecklessness and a refurbishment of their partisan resolve.
Then came last week. House RINOs demand that the Senate-passed ANWR drilling go-ahead be thrown out of the $54 billion spending cut package; Denny Hastert and the boys cave in the hope of getting RINO votes. Those RINOs then double-cross the leadership and move to vote down the bill anyway on fiscally liberal grounds.
Not to be outdone, their Senate counterparts hauled Big Oil execs to Capitol Hill and played Donk populist on their asses, demanding to know what they thought they were doing earning "record" profits and telling them what to do with that "windfall," or else they'd tax it all away from them - and while they're at it, they can cut gas prices at the pump back down to "affordable" levels. Meanwhile, RINO Senator Olympia Snowe was crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats against a pre-emptively compromised measure of Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley that would have extended the Bush tax cuts not permanently, or even for a couple of years, but just a single year, on the grounds that they would “demand[...] cuts in Medicaid and food-stamp benefits for the working poor.” These are the tax cuts that have produced...
As Michael T. Darda observes earlier in the NRO piece:
First, everybody's favorite Bush back-stabber, Darth Queeg, rammed through a bill banning "torture" of captured jihadis:
Andy McCarthy's description of the nature of this conflict is viscerally riveting:
How can this be, since torture, as conventionally (and previously) understood, is already illegal? Simple - by requiring that captured terrorists be accorded the very POW status, and all privileges therein, to which they are not entitled, particularly immunity from any coercive interrogation whatsoever:
McCarthy finishes with a devastating hypothetical:
The McCain amendment passed yesterday - by a vote of 90-9. That means that a minimum of 46 out of 55 Republicans answered McCarthy's question in the affirmative.
Is this what we elected Republican majorities to do? Not if even Extreme Media polling is to be believed.
How about this?
That last graph is key. Let's remember some fundamentals: the Republicans are the majority party in Congress. That means they ostensibly run the place and set the agenda. It also means that Democrats are the minority and are supposed to be powerless, and thus unable to even influence the agenda. Yet here is the majority party being bullied by the minority party, against which they are supposed to be pushing back in defense of their own president and his conduct of a war for our very national survival as we have known it for over two centuries against a vicious, no-holds-barred foe, into offering lame-assed, less-of-the-same anti-war meddling as though it were still the 1970s and the GOP was still an irrelevant legislative rump trying to scrounge scraps from the ruling Donk table.
But this isn't about taxes or spending or this or that - this is about victory or defeat in a conflict in which defeat is some variation on what is happening to France - or one or more mushroom clouds over American cities, or a bio attack with smallpox or ebola, or an EMP attack that would reduce our country to the technological level of the 1880s. And while Cap'n Ed, for whatever reason, tries to put the best face on this "demand for accountability" by arguing that this provides a forum for the White House to defend its GWOT policy - something it has done all too little of - the fact is that there is a clear difference between the President defending that policy of his own accord and being compelled to report to a hostile legislature on the conduct of a war that body authorized in the first place but which it is trying to cravenly and dishonorably renege upon now.
The measure passed today - by a vote of 79-19.
The bottom line is that two and a half years of anti-war agitating by the far left has finally borne fruit. They have driven the Republicans before them by forcing them to lay the foundation not just for American retreat from Iraq, but from the entire GWOT as well, to which cutting and running from Iraq would be tantamount. And, frankly, if Congress is going to cut the legs out from under the Commander-in-Chief, to say nothing of the war effort, why keep GOPers in charge when we've already got a party of jihadi-symps chomping at the bit to do it faster and without half-measures?
In an AmSpec piece that I referenced earlier today, J. Peter Freire concluded the following about next year's 2006 mid-term campaign:
The better question to ask is, "What in the news today would make the Republican Party less susceptible to defeat?" Because Freire's advice to 'Pubbies to "play it conservative by the book" is nowhere to be seen.
UPDATE: How could I have left out the obvious loop-closer? All that's left for Senate Republicans to do now is to fail to break a Donk filibuster of the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination, and their table of 2006 collapse will be set.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III (R-VA) actually said this to a doubtless chortling Washington Post
UPDATE II: Here are a few mileposts on that path:
~ ~ ~
It's like I always say in moments like this: I don't have to advocate that the GOP base teach GOP pols the lesson of disloyalty (in this case to the country as well as their supporters) that they never seem to learn; the base will do it all by itself.
They always do.
And never will it have been more deserved.
UPDATE III: Hmmm; Brother Hinderaker has joined Mr. Morrissey in the "Coalition of the Chillin.'" He coos that the "demand for accountability" measure passed today is "merely symbolic," and that what matters is that the Levin amendment, which would have triggered April-1975-Saigonesque U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, was soundly defeated. I think, along with Double H and Jed Babbin, that the Levin amendment could have been defeated without a competing Republican me-too alternative, and that what the latter symbolizes is the beginning of the end of American resistance in the GWOT.
The Powerliner does make an interesting point that one Donk motivation could be to position themselves to take credit for any significant troop reductions that take place next year as more and more U.S.-trained Iraqi military units come online - "Our troops wouldn't be coming home if we hadn't forced the issue last November" or some such - since they know in reality that the President's Iraq policy is, in fact, succeeding and they want to deny him as much public acclaim as possible when the time comes. That very well could be. But if that scenario bears out, once again we come back to the central point of the Republicans handing the Democrats a completely unnecessary victory on their strongest issue, on top of the fact that U.S. withdrawal has now officially been made a fait accompli without the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus having been dealt Saddam Hussein's fate.
I well remember the President saying from the very first days after 9/11, that this was a war that would outlast his presidency and would probably go on for a generation or more. And I remember wondering, and doubting, whether Americans had either the patience, the determination, or the attention span to see through a conflict of that nature and length.
Today those doubts look more prescient than ever.
I take this stroll down memory lane because it looks increasingly clear that, equivalently speaking, history is destined to repeat itself. Only this time, like a long train, the coming...well, train wreck, started slow and is slowly but steadily building up an unstoppable momentum.
That start came with the McCain Mutiny back before Memorial Day. Then, several months later there arrived the Second Louisiana Purchase following Hurricane Katrina, in which we were treated to brain farts like once and future House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's oblivious declaration that all the federal spending that could be cut had been cut and they couldn't cuts no more, which gave a whole new meaning to the expression "big boned." A month after that came the baffling Harriet Miers experiment.
The merciful withdrawal of the White House counsel and her replacement with Judge Samuel Alito, coupled with a renewed fiscal hawkishness, the fizzling of "Plamegate," and the hideously belated GOP push-back on the Dems' rehashed "BUSH LIED!!!!" gambit, seemed to signal a turning of the corner, and end to majority fecklessness and a refurbishment of their partisan resolve.
Then came last week. House RINOs demand that the Senate-passed ANWR drilling go-ahead be thrown out of the $54 billion spending cut package; Denny Hastert and the boys cave in the hope of getting RINO votes. Those RINOs then double-cross the leadership and move to vote down the bill anyway on fiscally liberal grounds.
Not to be outdone, their Senate counterparts hauled Big Oil execs to Capitol Hill and played Donk populist on their asses, demanding to know what they thought they were doing earning "record" profits and telling them what to do with that "windfall," or else they'd tax it all away from them - and while they're at it, they can cut gas prices at the pump back down to "affordable" levels. Meanwhile, RINO Senator Olympia Snowe was crossing the aisle to vote with the Democrats against a pre-emptively compromised measure of Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley that would have extended the Bush tax cuts not permanently, or even for a couple of years, but just a single year, on the grounds that they would “demand[...] cuts in Medicaid and food-stamp benefits for the working poor.” These are the tax cuts that have produced...
...[s]ince June 2003 real [annual] GDP growth [of] 4% while growth in real business fixed investment spending has averaged nearly 9% on an annualized basis. Real equipment and software spending has averaged 11% annualized growth. The stock market is up 26% since mid-2003. Tax receipts have surged $275 billion over last year’s levels, the strongest rate of growth in 23 years, with notable strength in “non-withheld receipts” which are tied to capital assets. And the fiscal deficit, which reached 3.4% of GDP in 2004, has fallen by nearly $100 billion to 2.5% of GDP in fiscal 2005, in line with the 30-year average.
As Michael T. Darda observes earlier in the NRO piece:
While there is no shortage of waste in Washington, I’m not sure why the Senate majority would hold tax cuts on dividends and capital gains (which have brought in more, not less, revenue) hostage to Medicaid spending. This approach is all stick and no carrot. It is akin to placing a loaded gun in the hands of the minority who will have no problem telling the electorate that the choice is between widows and orphans or “tax cuts for the rich.” If the debate is framed this way, it likely will be curtains for the tax cuts, and potentially the Republican majority in November 2006 as well.And just think - that was before yesterday.
First, everybody's favorite Bush back-stabber, Darth Queeg, rammed through a bill banning "torture" of captured jihadis:
Senator John McCain said Sunday that America's image abroad could be ruined if Congress doesn't ban the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody....Except that illegal combatants, which Islamist terrorists most certainly are, forfeit those rights by taking up terrorist arms against us. The terror war is a war of information as much as guns and bombs, and its extraction can be the difference between stopping and not stopping mass-casuality attacks. And the latter is a far greater blow to American prestige than trumped-up "torture" smears could ever be.
"If we are viewed as a country that engages in torture ... any possible information we might be able to gain is far counterbalanced by (the negative) effect of public opinion," McCain, R-AZ, said on CBS' Face the Nation. Terrorists are "the quintessence of evil," he said. "But it's not about them; it's about us. This battle we're in is about the things we stand for and believe in and practice. And that is an observance of human rights, no matter how terrible our adversaries may be."
Andy McCarthy's description of the nature of this conflict is viscerally riveting:
Terrorists do not just flout the laws of war. They turn them into an offensive weapon. When they are not killing civilians, they are hiding among them. When they are not blowing up civilian infrastructure — whether hotels, office buildings, or houses of worship — they are using them as weapons depots, meeting halls, and war rooms.
American soldiers are sitting ducks in an urban guerrilla war. They follow the laws of war. They wear uniforms and carry their weapons openly. Thus the terrorist enemy knows exactly whom to kill. And he kills in stealth. These enemies are not the Nazis. They are not coming at our guys donned in military array, or in tanks festooned with swastikas. They look exactly like the people our troops are trying to protect. They murder by sneaking up close. They murder by improvised explosive devices hidden in soda cans, or bushes, or cars, or on the booby-trapped bodies of the dead.
We don't know who they are or from which way they come. This is not a traditional foe. We can't conquer his territory. He doesn't have one. He's a nomad who trains in secret then sets up shop among innocents only long enough to kill. We can only desperately seek him out. We can only hope to kill or capture him before he uses the honor of true soldiers against them — before he converts to his advantage their moment's hesitation, borne of dedication to a code that war is to be fought between warriors, not by opening fire on non-combatants.Superior force and discipline are not enough against this adversary. We need intelligence. Intelligence is the single asset that stands between the terrorist and scores — if not more — of slaughtered civilians. Between the terrorist and murdered American military personnel. In the war on terror, as in no war before it, intelligence will be the difference between victory and defeat.
And if Senator John McCain has his way, the most urgently needed intelligence will be lost.
How can this be, since torture, as conventionally (and previously) understood, is already illegal? Simple - by requiring that captured terrorists be accorded the very POW status, and all privileges therein, to which they are not entitled, particularly immunity from any coercive interrogation whatsoever:
The McCain Amendment provides that no prisoner held by the Defense Department "shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by and listed in the United States Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation." That manual expressly forbids any use of force, coercion or intimidation in conducting questioning, even if such tactics fall short of torture, even if the prisoner is a terrorist guilty of war crimes, and even in a matter of life-and-death — perhaps thousands of deaths.
McCarthy finishes with a devastating hypothetical:
We should be asking this question of each and every member of Congress who claims to support the McCain Amendment: If we had credible information regarding an ongoing al Qaeda plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in the continental United States, and we had just taken into custody an al Qaeda militant who was in a position to know where and when the attack was to occur but who was refusing to cooperate, are you saying we would need to let thousands of Americans die rather than harm a hair on the terrorist's head in an effort to extract the information that might save them?
The McCain amendment passed yesterday - by a vote of 90-9. That means that a minimum of 46 out of 55 Republicans answered McCarthy's question in the affirmative.
Is this what we elected Republican majorities to do? Not if even Extreme Media polling is to be believed.
How about this?
In a sign of increasing unease among Congressional Republicans over the war in Iraq, the Senate is to consider on Tuesday a Republican proposal that calls for Iraqi forces to take the lead next year in securing the nation and for the Bush Administration to lay out its strategy for ending the war. ...
The proposal on the Iraq war, from Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, and Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would require the Administration to provide extensive new quarterly reports to Congress on subjects like progress in bringing in other countries to help stabilize Iraq. The other appeals related to Iraq are nonbinding and express the position of the Senate.
The plan stops short of a competing Democratic proposal that moves toward establishing dates for a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq. But it is built upon the Democratic approach and makes it clear that senators of both parties are increasingly eager for Iraqis to take control of their country in coming months and open the door to removing American troops. [emphasis added]
That last graph is key. Let's remember some fundamentals: the Republicans are the majority party in Congress. That means they ostensibly run the place and set the agenda. It also means that Democrats are the minority and are supposed to be powerless, and thus unable to even influence the agenda. Yet here is the majority party being bullied by the minority party, against which they are supposed to be pushing back in defense of their own president and his conduct of a war for our very national survival as we have known it for over two centuries against a vicious, no-holds-barred foe, into offering lame-assed, less-of-the-same anti-war meddling as though it were still the 1970s and the GOP was still an irrelevant legislative rump trying to scrounge scraps from the ruling Donk table.
But this isn't about taxes or spending or this or that - this is about victory or defeat in a conflict in which defeat is some variation on what is happening to France - or one or more mushroom clouds over American cities, or a bio attack with smallpox or ebola, or an EMP attack that would reduce our country to the technological level of the 1880s. And while Cap'n Ed, for whatever reason, tries to put the best face on this "demand for accountability" by arguing that this provides a forum for the White House to defend its GWOT policy - something it has done all too little of - the fact is that there is a clear difference between the President defending that policy of his own accord and being compelled to report to a hostile legislature on the conduct of a war that body authorized in the first place but which it is trying to cravenly and dishonorably renege upon now.
The measure passed today - by a vote of 79-19.
The bottom line is that two and a half years of anti-war agitating by the far left has finally borne fruit. They have driven the Republicans before them by forcing them to lay the foundation not just for American retreat from Iraq, but from the entire GWOT as well, to which cutting and running from Iraq would be tantamount. And, frankly, if Congress is going to cut the legs out from under the Commander-in-Chief, to say nothing of the war effort, why keep GOPers in charge when we've already got a party of jihadi-symps chomping at the bit to do it faster and without half-measures?
In an AmSpec piece that I referenced earlier today, J. Peter Freire concluded the following about next year's 2006 mid-term campaign:
Daydreams about a Democratic remake of 1994 are a long way off. Newt Gingrich had been working on building up the conservative base since the mid-1980s under Reagan, focusing on state primaries and encouraging candidates with conservative credentials. Numerous seats were left open thanks to a wave of retirements. Democrats were still reeling from the House bank scandal. What in the news today, between the intra-party squabbles and difficulty in moving legislation, would make the Republican Party so susceptible to defeat?
The better question to ask is, "What in the news today would make the Republican Party less susceptible to defeat?" Because Freire's advice to 'Pubbies to "play it conservative by the book" is nowhere to be seen.
UPDATE: How could I have left out the obvious loop-closer? All that's left for Senate Republicans to do now is to fail to break a Donk filibuster of the Samuel Alito SCOTUS nomination, and their table of 2006 collapse will be set.
Representative Thomas M. Davis III (R-VA) actually said this to a doubtless chortling Washington Post
...The current fixation on conservative voters may jeopardize his party's prospects for holding on to some of its seats. "If the leadership just plays to the base, they're going to be a minority leadership in the next Congress," he said.That inspires a question and a withering riposte: What "current fixation on conservative voters"? And, "If you people don't resume that 'fixation,' you'll find out just what the true path back to the minority wilderness really is."
UPDATE II: Here are a few mileposts on that path:
"Once again, it looks like the Republicans have hit the Democrats in the fist with their mouth."
~ ~ ~
Bill Frist is dead to me. If this amendment passes....I would encourage all Republicans to stop support for the NRSC and all related Senate Republican organizations. These psuedo-McCains do nothing more than encourage the enemies of America and Freedom that the US Senate is unwilling to commit to winning wars and spreading freedom. The enemies of Freedom both home and abroad will now know that America is no longer a force to be reckoned with, it is now one to be waited out.~ ~ ~
The President needs to go to war on the Senate. He comes back; he calls the Republican leadership into his office; he shows them the pen. You know the pen I mean too, the veto pen. He tells them “Kiss my ass if you think I’m signing a goddamned thing for anyone at anytime. We’ll just sit here for the next three years and we’ll see which of you figures out that the Executive branch actually means something in this government.”
I'm standing with the President on this one, and I don’t much care if we lose the Senate at this point, because as far as I can tell, we already have. These pinheads can sit in the minorty for awhile for all I care.
Not one dime you jackasses, not one freakin’ dime. [emphasis added]
It's like I always say in moments like this: I don't have to advocate that the GOP base teach GOP pols the lesson of disloyalty (in this case to the country as well as their supporters) that they never seem to learn; the base will do it all by itself.
They always do.
And never will it have been more deserved.
UPDATE III: Hmmm; Brother Hinderaker has joined Mr. Morrissey in the "Coalition of the Chillin.'" He coos that the "demand for accountability" measure passed today is "merely symbolic," and that what matters is that the Levin amendment, which would have triggered April-1975-Saigonesque U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, was soundly defeated. I think, along with Double H and Jed Babbin, that the Levin amendment could have been defeated without a competing Republican me-too alternative, and that what the latter symbolizes is the beginning of the end of American resistance in the GWOT.
The Powerliner does make an interesting point that one Donk motivation could be to position themselves to take credit for any significant troop reductions that take place next year as more and more U.S.-trained Iraqi military units come online - "Our troops wouldn't be coming home if we hadn't forced the issue last November" or some such - since they know in reality that the President's Iraq policy is, in fact, succeeding and they want to deny him as much public acclaim as possible when the time comes. That very well could be. But if that scenario bears out, once again we come back to the central point of the Republicans handing the Democrats a completely unnecessary victory on their strongest issue, on top of the fact that U.S. withdrawal has now officially been made a fait accompli without the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus having been dealt Saddam Hussein's fate.
I well remember the President saying from the very first days after 9/11, that this was a war that would outlast his presidency and would probably go on for a generation or more. And I remember wondering, and doubting, whether Americans had either the patience, the determination, or the attention span to see through a conflict of that nature and length.
Today those doubts look more prescient than ever.
posted by JASmius at 2:17 PM
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