They Really Did It

Just as a prefacing side note: That title is an ironic tribute to the Time magazine cover from December 1998 showing Bill Clinton in silhouette and the caption, "Will they really do it?" a reference to House Republicans' impeachment of the sexually incontinent scoundrel. Still one of the GOP's finest hours, just as today's House and Senate votes for quitting Iraq were among the Democrats' worst. For whatever it's worth, the House tally was 218-208, and the Senate's was 51-46, with two RINO crossovers (Hagel and Gordon Smith of Oregon - it says something that I have to type out his full name and the state he allegedly represents, doesn't it? And this is how he thinks he's going to get re-elected next year. Man, RINOs just never learn).

It's hard not to be amused at the ASSociated Press' overwrought verbiage:

A defiant Democratic-controlled Senate passed legislation Thursday that would require the start of troop withdrawals from Iraq by October 1, propelling Congress toward a historic veto showdown with President Bush on the war.

You almost have to mop up the drool from that reportage. "Defiant," "historic" - how about a "dramatic" confrontation with a "recalcitrant" White House for which this bill is a "cataclysmic" rebuff? I haven't seen such a hyperventilating buildup since Wrestlemania XXIII a month ago.

It's so weak that the AP can't help but let the air out of its own balloon in the very next graf:

The 51-46 vote was largely along party lines, and like House passage of the same bill a day earlier, fell far short of the two-thirds margin needed to overturn the President’s threatened veto. Nevertheless, the legislation is the first binding challenge on the war that Democrats have managed to send to Bush since they reclaimed control of both houses of Congress in January.

Four friggin' months and this is the first binding challenge? Wow, the nutters sure got their money's worth, didn't they?

This isn't a "challenge," in case there was any doubt. It's a tactic. The Donks knew from...well, January, that they don't have the votes to quit the war, um, unilaterally. Just as they knew that they lack the votes to force the President to do it for them. Hence, this poison pill. By linking mandatory retreat from Iraq to the supplemental appropriation for present operations, they can go to the cameras and microphones and claim that, "We tried to fund the troops, but it was George Bush who stood in the way. Just as we want to do what's best for them by bringing them home, and he stands in the way of that, too." It's also designed to provide absolution for those Dems who voted for the original Iraq war resolution in the first place. Annnnnd, once Bush vetoes it, God only knows when Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry will get back around to taking another crack at a fresh supplemental appropriations bill, while Operation Iraqi Freedom gets defunded, piecemeal, by default.

That's certainly the impression I get from this quote:

“This bill is a statement that Congress will no longer fund the war as it exists today,” said Representative Louise Slaughter, the New York Democrat who is chairwoman of the Rules Committee, as she opened the debate.

In context, "As it exists today" can only mean "staying in the fight and trying to win it." It's an extraneous qualifier, really, as what it truly means is, "Congress will no longer fund the war," just not directly, but by using the President as his own obstacle.

I wouldn't call it an ingenious strategy, but it does earn decent marks for cleverness. A propagandist of even ordinary skill could and would blow it apart with a maximally public, photo-oped, Rose Garden veto ceremony wherein the President would take the bill apart, molecule by molecule, and so scorch it with scorn and ridicule that Reid's head would be spinning around his pipe-cleaner neck and Pelosi wouldn't surface for weeks. Heck, make it a nationally televised address. Put the entire f'ing Democrat Party in the docket, beneath the 5 megawatt klieg lights, and drill the living hell out of their six-year cavalcade of sedition and treason (without using the specific words, of course).

Bill Clinton wouldn't have left one smidgen of GOP flesh sticking to a single GOP bone when he'd gotten finished. But this is George W. Bush we're talking about. The Mr. Rogers of American politics. The man who could be called a kiss-ass if it were conceivable that his bipartisan obsequiousness was anything less than entirely genuine. I quite frankly fear what such an exercise would produce with Mr. Manners in front of the camera.

I guess that's what Dick Cheney is for:

The timetable legislation that [Reid] is now pursuing, would guarantee defeat. Senator Reid himself has said that the war in Iraq would bring his party more seats in the next election. It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage.

Simple, honest, straightforward truth, expressed calmly and rationally. But to listen to the Donks' reaction, you'd think they'd been reading....well, this blog:

REID: The President sends out his attack dog often. That's also known as Dick Cheney. I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9% approval rating.

"Attack dog"? How did Big Time "attack" Reid? What names did he call Dirty Harry? And this from the same man who called the President "a loser" (but only after Dubya had gone on an overseas trip) and insulted former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as a "political hack," just to cite a couple of examples at random. And, heck, he called Cheney a "dog". That doesn't sound very nice. It was a freudian slip that Reid referenced poll numbers (he didn't cite a source for that 9% one, not surprisingly; doubtless pulled it out of his ass, like pretty much every comment he's made over the past week); proves the veep's point.

Not all jackasses contented themselves with whining, though; at least one has moved toward the Main Event:

After hinting for weeks that he would initiate impeachment actions against the Bush Administration, Cleveland Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich on Tuesday introduced three articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney.

Kucinich said Congress should oust Cheney from office for "fabricating a threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction" to trick Congress and the public into believing war with Iraq was necessary. He said Cheney also manipulated intelligence to deceive the public about purported links between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaida, the group responsible for the attacks on September 11.

Additionally, Kucinich accused Cheney of threatening aggression against Iran even though Iran has not threatened the United States.

What have I been saying since last November? An impeachment blue plate special - two (i.e. Bush and Cheney) for the price of one - is inevitable, with the goal of putting Nancy Pelosi in the White House to keep the big chair warm for Hillary Clinton. Heck, maybe they could even pass legislation canceling the 2008 election and just awarding the presidency to her. Pelosi would sign it if she knew what was good for her. And it would be such sweet revenge for what the nutters believe was done to them in 2000.

Kucinich's effort, fueled by long-discredited lies, won't get anywhere, at least initially. But like all core ideas of the Democrat Party, it's starting on the fringe (or, given that we're talking Democrats here, the fringe of the fringe), and will work its way to their [heh] "mainstream," probably before the summer is out. Just listen to Kucinich's rhetoric on CNN last night and tell me this couldn't come out of the mouth of just about any Democrat these days:

"This goes beyond partisan terms," Kucinich said. "This becomes a question of who we are as a people."

D'ya get that? Decapitating the Bush Administration based on malevolent fairy tales isn't partisan. I guess who Dennis Kucinich wants us to be as a people is hairless geeks with hideous decades-old Beatles wigs who viciously slander their betters to prop up flaccid comic relief presidential bids. Maybe the 9% Dirty Harry was referring to was Kucinich's portion of the Dem primary vote, although that would indicate something along the lines of a thousand percent, um, "surge."

Well, the Democrats can't impeach all of us. Take Rudy Giuliani, whose balls are definitely bigger than his bald spot:

Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of September 11, 2001.

But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

"If any Republican is elected president....we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it," Giuliani said....

"But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have?" Giuliani said. "If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer."

"I listen a little to the Democrats and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense," Giuliani continued. "We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-September 11 attitude of defense."

He added: "The Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us."

Or the man whom the Enemy Media are trying to smear as a real-life Nehemiah Scudder, Mitt Romney:

"What Jimmy Carter fails to understand is what so many fail to understand: Whether it is Hamas or Hezbollah or al Qaeda, there is an overarching goal among the violent jihadists that transcends borders and boundaries. That goal is to replace all modern Islamic states with a caliphate, to destroy Israel, to cause the collapse of the West and the United States, and to conquer the world."

Or the man who ought to have the full and complete attention of Harry Reid's caucus at the moment, "Independent Joe" Lieberman:

When we say that U.S. troops shouldn’t be “policing a civil war,” that their operations should be restricted to this narrow list of missions, what does this actually mean?

To begin with, it means that our troops will not be allowed to protect the Iraqi people from the insurgents and militias who are trying to terrorize and kill them. Instead of restoring basic security, which General Petraeus has argued should be the central focus of any counterinsurgency campaign, it means our soldiers would instead be ordered, by force of this proposed law, not to stop the sectarian violence happening all around them—no matter how vicious or horrific it becomes.

In short, it means telling our troops to deliberately and consciously turn their backs on ethnic cleansing, to turn their backs on the slaughter of innocent civilians—men, women, and children singled out and killed on the basis of their religion alone. It means turning our backs on the policies that led us to intervene in the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the principles that today lead many of us to call for intervention in Darfur. [Ouch, that one ought to bite deep into any Donk who still has a memory and a conscience]

This makes no moral sense at all.

It also makes no strategic or military sense either.

al Qaeda’s own leaders have repeatedly said that one of the ways they intend to achieve victory in Iraq is to provoke civil war. They are trying to kill as many people as possible today, precisely in the hope of igniting sectarian violence, because they know that this is their best way to collapse Iraq’s political center, overthrow Iraq’s elected government, radicalize its population, and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East that they can use as a base.

That is why al Qaeda blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year. And that is why we are seeing mass casualty suicide bombings by al Qaeda in Baghdad now.

I'll believe Lieberman's defection when I see it, but the logic of his words and the actions of his party sure look to be on a collision course. That may be the reality that mugs Dirty Harry, relegating him back to minority leader status again in a spectacular debacle of reckless, arrogant hand-overplaying. A more poetic justice I could not imagine.

Or poor ol' Joe is bluffing. But at least there are a handful of Pachyderms who are willing to tell it like it is regarding the war and the Democrats' fanatical efforts to thwart any chance of winning it. Now if only their colleagues actually holding elective office (including that nice, polite fellow in the Oval Office) and not running for president could join them.