You needed a reason?

[kyburg]

Now you know why I'm not a Democrat.



HONESTLY.

Comments

I've had it with politics...

[tomlemos.livejournal.com]

and I'm only going to pay enough attention so that they don't totally trample on my rights...

[legion-myers.livejournal.com]

Ugh... I'm with ya on the being angry about this.. geeze.

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

I am confused. What are the democrats supposed to do? Bush will veto anything with a pullout provision or even a timeline. They don't have enough votes to overcome a veto. What magic thing would you do differently?

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

They're caving. That's what I'm pissed off about. The only thing they agreed on was that something needed to be passed by Memorial Day.

(I disagree about the pullouts, BTW. But we'll never know, will we?)

They say wait for September. Bugger that.

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

Caving on what? In what way are they caving? THEY CANNOT GET WHAT THEY WANT. THE PRESIDENT WILL VETO IT. THEY CANNOT OVERCOME THE VETO. So what are they supposed to do? I mean, I guess they can refuse to fund the troops. Which will alienate the majority of Americans. The nation is just not sufficiently against the war to go there yet.

[kuangning]

This a case where making the attempt, however futile, would have gone a long way. Having the courage of your convictions doesn't cease to be important when you're not in a position to win.

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

This a case where making the attempt, however futile, would have gone a long way.

they did make the futile attempt. They can't withdraw troops without either the president's signature or 2/3 of the congress. they have neither, but they tried anyway, got vetoed, attempted to overcome the veto, and lost. NOW WHAT.

[kuangning]

"Now what" is refuse to pass it and hold your ground, as opposed to backing down. It was a staring match and they looked away. No, they can't bring the troops home by themselves. But the President can't spend a single dollar on that war without them, either.

If they had just kept on refusing to cooperate, sooner or later, the pressure to get *something* passed in order to make that funding available would have gotten them withdrawal dates. They'd've had to compromise on when those dates were, but not if they would be there. The power was on their side to hold things up until the administration caved, in that the administration needed that bill passed *at all*, while they needed it passed *with those dates*, but they caved in.

And by caving, they've let the power pass out of their hands. The next time funding comes up and they want a timetable, no-one will take them seriously because they didn't hold fast this time. That's the "now what."

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

Well, you're basically advocating that the Dems block funding... which, as Eyelid says, would be a horribly bad move on the Dems part.

Bush is all too happy to paint the Dems as unpatriotic, troop-hating appeasniks, and such a move would play right into that. Bush is the one who's more than happy to use the troops as a political cudgel, and because of that, he'd never have blinked - every day he refused to back down and the troops went without funding was a day he built up political support.

In contrast, by September there'll be a lot of moderate Republicans ready to break with the President - they know how unpopular the war is, and they don't want it nuking their electoral chances in '08. There may be a lot of people who want us out of Iraq now now now, but it's far smarter for the Dems to wait it out.

[studiogaijin.livejournal.com]

But the President can't spend a single dollar on that war without them, either.

Yeah, it's not like they can use any of the $440 *billion* or so in the military's budget this year, or the money already allocated for the wars. ;) The way they spend money though, I bet they are running out of money they can spend without cutting into new weapon systems and other things they want to spend it on.

It's their own fault though, since these "emergency spending bills" that keep coming up are not unexpected new expenses as much as they are part of a smoke screen to hide the real cost of the war in Iraq by not fully funding it up front (and maybe other reasons I'm unaware of). With all of the fighting over this one though, it raises the profile on this more than they wanted, but at least it's only a paltry hundred billion dollars we're talking about this time, not the estimated one to two *trillion* we've spent on the war.

How we can have that big of a window of possibility with those numbers is unfathomable, especially since there's even room for some people to say we've spent a lot less than that, generally without being called liars. I guess it means that the smoke screen is working. The fact that they want nearly $100 billion in *extra* funding just for a period of 6 months or less when the war has been going on for over 4 years says to me that the higher estimates are probably closer to the truth.

If they had just kept on refusing to cooperate, sooner or later, the pressure to get *something* passed in order to make that funding available would have gotten them withdrawal dates.

You may be right, but I think that the democrats feel like they've won here, even though it looks like they caved and I think it's really hurting their support and helping the president's image among his supporters who want him to be completely unyielding when faced with any opposition and to only do what he wants to do when he wants to do it.

If you look a little deeper though, it seem to me that the timing of the administration's new policies is too much to be a coincidence. They're suddenly agreeing to finally start (limited) talks with Iran and other governments in the region along with their even more recently announced decision to (supposedly) start trying to negotiate political solutions with the various factions in Iraq instead of just trying to kill them all.

Despite many calls for immediate pullout or phased redeployment, I think that (if actually carried out) these are the kinds of things that many of the democrats actually wanted to happen. I just wish that they could take credit for having an effect here instead of looking like ineffectual losers and letting the president take credit for anything good that might come out of the change in strategy, if it's genuine.

I think you're right about next time though. They may or may not have enough to satisfy them out of this round, and they may think that having stood up to the president for a while was enough to make them look good in all of this, but in the end they look weak to me, at least publicly, and they're making the legislative branch of government look helpless and weak while King George looks invincible. What George wants, George gets.

[eyelid.livejournal.com]

You honestly think that the president would ever have agreed to a timetable for withdrawal? What happy shiny dreamland is this that you live in?

What would actually have happened is that Republicans would gleefully pounce on the D's refusal to fund the troops. They'd buy up commerical time, publicize statements from troops in the field about how they don't have armor etc, and every time a soldier died they'd hold a press conference about how the Ds are sacrificing our soldiers.

And then the Rs would get re-elected.

[kshandra]

I'd be interested in seeing an article on this that isn't coming from Useless News and World Distortion.

[dhd1.livejournal.com]

Gee, it's not as if they could actually do anything constructive without being accused of Aiding the Enemy, or having the Blood of the Martyrs splattered all over them... :\