I think they finally
pissed Bush off:
The purpose of the emergency war spending bill I requested was to provide our troops with vital funding. Instead, Democrats in the House, in an act of political theater, voted to substitute their judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq. They set rigid restrictions that will require an army of lawyers to interpret. They set an arbitrary date for withdrawal without regard for conditions on the ground. And they tacked on billions for pet projects that have nothing to do with winning the war on terror. This bill has too much pork, too many conditions and an artificial timetable for withdrawal.We all know the Democrats want America to lose. That has been apparent for a long time. What was not known was how public they would be about it, how much they value the kooks on their...well, I was going to say fringe, but they're now the leftist mainstream. The best part of Bush's response was this:
Amid the real challenges in Iraq, we're beginning to see some signs of progress. Yet, to score political points, the Democratic majority in the House has shown it is willing to undermine the gains our troops are making on the ground.Amen. The Democrats seek to undermine the troops. It's about time he said it. Now he needs to say it again and again. In
Rush's words, the Democrats Own Defeat. They are losers, they want America to join them.
I hope the President keeps telling it like it is, and stops trying to be nice to people who lack a shred of decency.
Believe it or not, though, I am optimistic. I have faith in our military, and I think the surge is going to work. I think our troops will continue to succeed in securing Baghdad, and this will spread to other regions in Iraq. Eventually, our media will no longer be able to ignore it, as they have
this story regarding a carnival in Baghdad. You have to search and search to find any positive reporting despite the great advances that are being made by our fine military people. I believe, though, that there are enough outlets who want America to win that the news will get out despite seditious organizations like
The New York Times. They will become increasingly irrelevant as more and more people recognize their anti-America, pro-liberal slant. Soon the only people subscribing will be the kooks on the Left, and that won't sustain them because most of them are jobless and living with their parents. (A little sarcasm there...but only a little)
In the end, I think the truth and America will emerge victorious. Until then, we have to keep fighting the treasonous Left, and hope Bush continues to tell it like it is.
JASmius adds: I'm not the optimist Jen is, but there are some encouraging signs out there.
For starters,
the lengths to which the enemy is having to go to even mount attacks:
A US military official has said children have been used in a bomb attack in Iraq, raising fears that insurgents are using a new tactic.
General Michael Barbero said a vehicle stopped at a checkpoint was waved through because two children were seen in the back, but was then detonated.
Militants were changing tactics in response to tighter security, he said....
General Barbero said there had been also two adults in the car. They parked it near a market, abandoned it with the children inside and apparently detonated it.
The two children died, along with three civilians in the vicinity, officials said.
I've never been much for the notion of "winning the hearts and minds" of the local populace in this war. Muslim culture is so front-running that I've always believed that if we win, swiftly and crushingly, on the battlefield, if we fight the jihadis as ruthlessly and mercilessly as they fight us, the alliegence of Iraqis would follow. Plus, you know, all that other stuff about getting utilities working, building schools, keeping the oil flowing and the trains running on time. And ferris wheels. Whereas any hesitation, vaccilation, or indecision would seed doubts about our willingness to do whatever it takes to win, and provide the enemy with reason to believe that they can wait us out.
Last November was a huge step in the wrong direction in this regard. But "the Surge" has offset that grievous setback, and the spectre of using children - unsuspecting or not - as suicide bombers is despicable even for terrorists, and cannot possibly gibe with the notion that the Iraqi people at large are still even hypothetically sympathetic to their demonic cause.
Here's further evidence of the success of General Petraus' strategy:
After warning that the threat of deadly EFPs, or Explosively Formed Penetrators, was growing at an alarming rate, the U.S. military now says there's been a "dramatic" decrease in the use of the powerful roadside bombs.
EFPs "can punch through most of the armor out on the battlefield today," Army Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman said of the devices, which U.S. officials have said come from Iran. ...
"In February, we noticed a 47% decrease in explosively formed penetrators being detonated against our troops, a 53% decrease in the number of troops wounded and a 51% decrease in the number of troops killed" by the devices, he said.
The reported decrease came as the U.S. military offered to reporters what it said was proof that weapons like EFPs were being manufactured in Iran. The Iranian government has denied any involvement in providing weapons or material support to Iraq's insurgency.
According to Garver, the reasons for the marked drop in EFP incidents could include the detention of three Iranians in Baghdad in December. One of the men was believed to be a high-level Operations Officer with the Quds Force of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard.
If the QF can't get EFP fixin's into Iraq, and Iranian proxies are deprived of the facilities in which to assemble them, and the stepped-up presence of U.S. and Iraqi security forces impedes their distribution and deployment, the end result is fewer roadside bombs killing or maiming American and Iraqi soldiers and Iraqi civilians. And children are, to put it lightly, a piss-poor substitute.
As
the Cap'n put it yesterday, "It looks like the surge is succeeding faster than the anti-war critics can get Congress to declare defeat."
It also looks like the Fifth Columnists that control Congress
are having unexpected difficulties in debasing the war effort into another Vietnam debacle:
Democrats are divided on the [war] and hold only a narrow majority in Congress. Their leaders, hands tied if just a few members stray, are finding it tough to pass legislation that would require Bush to start bringing troops home.
[S]everal hurdles remained. Several anti-war liberals were expected to join Republicans in opposing the measure because they say it continues to bankroll an immoral war. And if the bill does scrape by in the House, it may sink in the Senate, where many Democrats have resisted firm timetables on the war.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, continued Wednesday to press party members to back the bill, unsure whether she had enough votes to pass it. In a closed-door meeting, former President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, tried to convince party skeptics that the bill was their best chance at ending the war.
Pelosi initially had planned for a final vote Thursday but pushed it off until Friday, a tactic that gives her more time to ensure she has the votes to pass it.
"Pressing party members to back the bill" is a prissy euphemism for, "pump it so full of pork that the Capitol dissolves in a tsunami of bacon grease."
$24 billion worth, all targeted at turning the votes of the subtely-named "Out of Iraq Caucus" who object to the bill because it establishes the deadline for pell-mell retreat a year and a half from now rather than immediately.
It is highly educational as to where the "center" lies in the Democrat Party these days. Also highly revealing that the
Washington Post both notices it and
does not approve:
Today the House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill that would grant $25 million to spinach farmers in California. The legislation would also appropriate $75 million for peanut storage in Georgia and $15 million to protect Louisiana rice fields from saltwater. More substantially, there is $120 million for shrimp and menhaden fishermen, $250 million for milk subsidies, $500 million for wildfire suppression and $1.3 billion to build levees in New Orleans.
Altogether the House Democratic leadership has come up with more than $20 billion in new spending, much of it wasteful subsidies to agriculture or pork barrel projects aimed at individual members of Congress. At the tail of all of this logrolling and political bribery lies this stinger: Representatives who support the bill - for whatever reason - will be voting to require that all U.S. combat troops leave Iraq by August 2008, regardless of what happens during the next seventeen months or whether U.S. commanders believe a pullout at that moment protects or endangers U.S. national security, not to mention the thousands of American trainers and Special Forces troops who would remain behind.
The Democrats claim to have a mandate from voters to reverse the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq. Yet the leadership is ready to piece together the votes necessary to force a fateful turn in the war by using tactics usually dedicated to highway bills or the Army Corps of Engineers budget. The legislation pays more heed to a handful of peanut farmers than to the 24 million Iraqis who are living through a maelstrom initiated by the United States, the outcome of which could shape the future of the Middle East for decades. [emphasis added]
The Iraqi's "maelstrom" was not, of course, "initiated by the United States," but by our, and their, enemies who are determined to re-subjugate them. And as Jen notes above, "maelstrom" is a rank Enemy Media exaggeration in any case. But I suppose the
Post op-eders had to get their shot in.
Still, the balance of the piece is startlingly condemnatory, considering its source. It's difficult to say which Donk faction is the more reprehensible - the overt traitors who insist we surrender NOW!, or the corrupt traitors who are perfectly willing to sell the lives of countless Iraqi (and, eventually, American) civilians into butchery for billions in spinach subsidies, moehair grants, and an unlimited supply of magic beans. To say nothing of timing the last-helicopter-bugging-out-from-the-Baghdad-green-zone photo op for what may be the night Mrs. Clinton gives her nomination acceptance speech at the Democrat National Convention. You can bet the two would be coordinated.
Guess what?
The "Out Of Iraqers" had their price. Proving that they're ALL corrupt and ALL traitors. But to what end? There's no way that even the cowards in the Senate GOP remnant won't filibuster this bill until the retreat timetable is expunged from it. And the President has already promised a veto. The DisLoyalists will never get what they want.
Or will they, after a fashion? Dubya himself pointed out the method behind this latest bit of Donk madness:
These Democrats believe that the longer they can delay funding for our troops, the more likely they are to force me to accept restrictions on our commanders, an artificial timetable for withdrawal, and their pet spending projects. This is not going to happen. Our men and women in uniform need these emergency war funds. The secretary of defense has warned that if Congress does not approve the emergency funding for our troops, by April the 15th, our men and women in uniform will face significant disruptions, and so will their families. Democrats have sent their message. Now it's time to send their money. This is an important moment of decision for the new leaders in Congress. Our men and women in uniform should not have to worry that politicians in Washington will deny them the funds and the flexibility they need to win. Congress needs to send me a clean bill that I can sign without delay. I expect Congress to do its duty and to fund our troops. And so do the American people. [emphasis added]
As
El Rushbo described it, "[T]he President turned around, a bunch of military people in uniform standing behind him, he turned around, he looked at them, you could see the look on his face, 'I am your commander-in-chief. I have your concerns. I'm the one that's on your side.'"
There does not
seem to be any question that Bush is drawing the metaphorical line - this far, no further. I say "seem" because only time will tell whether his line is drawn in concrete or sand. Ditto whether, as Limbaugh added, "[The American people] don't want the troops underfunded and the American people do not want the US military to lose," or the American people want the troops home, NOW!, the nation to retreat into neoisolationism, and to hell with Iraq and Afghanistan just like we sent Indochina spiralling into genocide thirty years ago. Because the latter is, no matter what anybody else says, precisely what the American people voted for almost five months ago.
Maybe it's finally dawning on the President that no idea, no matter how self-evidently right and virtuous, will sell itself when hordes of ignorant, rabid extremists wage unshirted war against it. That his failure to make that realization, as well as his stubborn, irrational devotion to "the New Tone," is what has inflicted on the country a Congress that would enact such disgusting infamy. And that there is only a difference of degree, and not much at that, between the Islamists who want to destroy us in the name of their demon god, and the neoStalinists who are so eager to let them do it.
Or maybe his base "reaching out" instinct will quickly reassert itself.
On that outcome does a whole lot more than just the future of the Middle East ride.
UPDATE: "
You won’t find a more intelligent summary of how the denizens of Capitol Hill find themselves increasingly estranged from reality." [h/t
DB]
UPDATE II: One of the GOP presidential hopefuls takes my advice and
weighs in decisively:
Capitol Hill Democrats have once again proved their inability to make Washington work in the right manner.
The Democrat Congress' maneuver to micromanage our military efforts from their offices on Capitol Hill, along with the fiscally deplorable action of loading up a wartime spending bill with pork barrel earmarks unrelated to our military's fight against terrorism has provided the American people with yet another example of the Washington mindset run amok.
Democrats in Washington have established a dangerous policy that essentially provides the enemy a planning calendar with a date certain surrender. By voting for such a policy, they have jeopardized our chances for success and endangered the mission of establishing democracy and defeating the terrorists in Iraq.
All Americans want our troops out of Iraq, but we should never do so in a way that would jeopardize American security. Setting a public timeline without consideration of future circumstances, as they may exist at that time, is reckless and irresponsible.
I urge President Bush to veto this measure and send a clear message to Washington Democrats that they must not and will not undermine the efforts of the United States military.
Wow. Mitt Romney really does want to be our next president.
He won't be, but his heart's in the right place, even if a majority of American voters have lost their minds.
