Add Sens. Judd Gregg and Lamar Alexander to the list of Republicans who have soured on Iraq but refuse to do anything about it.
On Friday, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told the paper, “It should be clear to the president that there needs to be a new strategy. Our policy in Iraq is drifting;” and “Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who helped lead the charge earlier this year against Democratic efforts to oppose Bush’s troop buildup, said: ‘We don’t seem to be making a lot of progress.'”
[…] “None of these GOP lawmakers has embraced Democratic legislation to compel a troop withdrawal,” the paper notes. “But nearly five years after congressional Republicans overwhelmingly answered Bush’s call for military action against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, some are doing what was once unthinkable: challenging a wartime president from their own party.”
Profiles in courage all.
The Other Steve
David Shuster is the MAN!
Sad that more journalists aren’t willing to stand up for the truth like this.
jake
Prepare for a gesture featuring the middle digits of both hands the next time these clowns have to vote on a measure that might stop the madness. I do hope none of their constituents are surprised.
Rome Again
Agreed, are they about to give him a show to anchor? I’m not so sure he wouldn’t serve us better remaining in the field with his scoop hat on.
norbizness
If Lamar was wearing his flannel shirt whilst delivering that mealy-mouthed non-missive, I’d be more impressed.
scarshapedstar
I hereby propose that every Republican who takes this tack immediately receive the “Golden Neuticle Award.” (Graphic forthcoming.)
Remember, kids:
S.W. Anderson
Anyone who thinks Alexander’s war quote is lame should get his take on what makes for a good and successful presidential candidate. Has to have a deep, rich voice, be likeable, be someone people will be comfortable looking at and listening to for four or eight years.
IOW, style over substance. Can be dense as a paperweight, lazy and crooked. Just so he or she looks good in a suit and has a listenable voice.
This was in a CNN segment with (as best I can recall) Larry King earlier this year.
MarkT
I think Bill Sher got this right – these guys are not really “breaking with the President”. They are just establishing a little distance between the GOP candidates and the low-polling President. It’s just a political maneuver.
caustics
Here is where we should be grateful for the Rush/Hannity/Freeper ball-and-chain these guys have to drag around. If they ever actually vote with Dems against the war to save their own asses, they’re fucked with the nutroots and the RNC noise/fundraising machine. If they don’t, they’re fucked with everyone else. Either way, they loose at least half the Senate seats they have to defend in 2008.
Fledermaus
You really have to wonder when these GOP Senators are going to realize that come september there will only be the choice between the dems withdrawl plan and another blank check for Bush.
Punchy
I thought I read somewheres that the Dems were going to keep bringing up resolutions/bills to bring the troops home throughout the summer in an effort to continuously embarrass the Rs. Havent seen any of this lately.
Anyone see the remarks Bush made today blaming–get this–the DEMS for not passing his immigration bill? He just pretended as if his own party had nothing to do with it. Just fucking amazing the chutzpuh.
rachel
Right on cue…
Pb
Harry Reid speaks the truth. Now is that your strategy for the next year or two, or are you going to do something about it?
ConservativelyLiberal
Actually, it is kinda curious watching the evolution of these Repubs position on Iraq. They have demonized the Dems so much as ‘surrendering’, ‘wanting to lose the war’, ‘not behind the troops’ and the many other descriptive words/phrases that they like to toss out there that are supposed to make the Dems look weak (and themselves look strong). The same with ‘cut and run’, and ‘flip flopping’. These words/phrases are meant to paint the Dems as yellow (bellied) and themselves as true blue (or RED, the color they prefer to describe themselves as).
While these words/phrases whip up their base, an unintended consequence of them is that they have basically painted themselves into a corner. If they change their position, they open themselves up to being called the same thing by their constituents, and more importantly, their primary challengers.
Oh what to do, what to do??? The problem is, they have painted themselves into a corner using the blood of our men and women, and the blood of innocents that have been maimed and killed in Iraq. Reading about these ‘defectors’ over at Red(neck)State would be amusing if not for all of the blood that they have spilled in the name of the GWOT/GSAVE.
As I see it, it will take some crafty work by these ‘defectors’ and some Dems who will try to put together a ‘third position’ that is supposed to be midway between the current Dem and Repub positions. When this happens, they will gladly embrace the ‘new’ position as acceptable to the majority. When they have this cover, you can bet they will beat a path to the nearest news outlet to crow about their success.
In other words, this is all about them and their careers, not about the men and women who are either fighting or trying to survive. They do not support the troops, they support their careers. Everything else is secondary to that.
What we need is someone out there who can call it as they see it, and to keep calling it what it is over and over again. These worms need to be shamed into doing what is right. As long as they are able to enable each other, we the people do not stand a chance. Nor will anyone who in our sights.
If nothing else, this alone is the poster child for the reason we need term limits. I think that term limits is the only way to get a politician to do what is right for the nation, not themselves and their electoral careers. When they are free from the ‘fear’ of not being re-elected, only then will they vote with the interests of the nation and their constituents in mind.
Just some thoughts from the peanut gallery…
rachel
I’d agree to that only if we can also get rid of all the lobbyists at the same time.
Wilfred
I’ve had enough of all this leftist negativity. How about some positive news for a change? Yesterday, the Administration revealed that in June it had admitted 63 Iraqi refugees into the United State, way up from the 1 person in let in May and that other guy who came in April. That makes for a staggering total of 133 Iraqis welcomed to the US in the 2006 – 2007 fiscal year. Fuckin’ ay dude, and they say this is a racist country. FREEDOM!
http://www.iraqslogger.com/index.php/post/3461/US_Admitted_63_Iraqi_Refugees_in_June
133 people, that’s less than were killed yesterday. As predicted endlessly and everywhere, the targets of the surge just went somewhere else. I’m saving my spit for these politicians.
ConservativelyLiberal
I would agree to banning lobbyists in a heartbeat. While the courts have determined that businesses can lobby the government, just like any individual, businesses do not vote. They do not serve in the armed forces, they do not go to jail for breaking the law, they do not do not have a vote in choosing office holders, and there are many more examples of the differences between the individual and a business. Yet the courts have chosen to treat businesses in a way that I feel favors them over the individual. This, IMO, is wrong.
If a business has supporters, such as a large number of individuals, there is all of the support they need. Let the individuals be their ‘lobbyists’. As it now is, when I hear ‘lobbyist’, the first thought I have is ‘corrupt’. That is followed by words like ‘bribe’, ‘favors’, ‘gifts’, ‘leeches’ and I could go on forever. I do not know of a single lobbyist that has the interests of the individual in mind.
The courts will not do anything, so it is up to the politicians to do something. The only way that this will ever happen is if term limits are passed. I view our government as a body of water, like a lake. You need a constant inflow of fresh water to the lake or it stagnates and kills everything around it. That is what we have now, stagnation.
Instead of a lake, maybe a toilet would be a better choice. You have to flush the toilet periodically or is just backs up and overflows, spilling crap all over the place.
Yes, toilet it is…
Redhand
Tim F., I think your carping about the alleged meaninglessness of these Repubs publicly questioning Iraq policy is both gratuitously partisan and just plain infantile. The Demos didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory with their cave-in on the last funding bill, did they? So what assertive Democratic agenda are these Republicans supposed to sign on to? Gimme a break. Try a little intellectual honesty on this one, wouldja?
The sh*t is going to hit the fan in September, not before, sad to say, because both parties now find it expedient to “support the troops” while awaiting General Petraeus’s surge “assessment.” In the meantime, every Republican defection from Iraq undermines Bush, which is a good thing. There’s a commentary in today’s WaPo by Byron York, Base to Bush: It’s Over that bears reading. I think he nails the real risk we face over Iraq policy this way:
In this context, individual Republican defections are helpful, but I fear what we’re really going to see is a political quagmire in Congress equal to the military quagmire in Iraq. Lives will needlessly lost through January 2009 because neither party will muster the guts, or bipartisan ability, to cut off funding and end this hideous war.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s unrealistic to expect Congress alone to stop a war the “Commander in Chief” started. War powers are largely the province of the President once the shooting starts, and legislators are ill-equipped to combat war policy, other than through the bludgeon of funding. We’ve seen how well that works.
The problem here is that we have a President too stupid, venal and egotistical to realize that he has to do the right thing, and end this. LBJ did the right thing in 1968 when he tried to stop the war, only to be frustrated by Nixon’s “I have a plan,” which underscores the special powers of the “Commander in Chief” in wartime.
Don’t expect Bush to even try to follow in LBJ’s footsteps. We’re not going to see real steps to end this until we have a new President in 2009.
jake
Warning. Prepare for Goal Post Shift in 5…4…3…
Surprised? Anyone?
[crickets chirp]
Clip n’ Save Quote:
The horror. The horror.
Pb
I seriously doubt that. Unless you’re just talking about Americans killed in Iraq, that is.
Zifnab
Is this the type of evidence that gave us Saddam’s WMDs that were in Tikrit and north, south, east, and west somewhat?
I can’t agree with this at all, simply because businesses are just a collection of people working together to earn money. You can’t ban “lobbyists from businesses” because that’s not what you’re banning at all. You’re banning lobbyists who speak for the CEOs of those businesses. And if you can ban a CEO from communicating with his Congressman / Senator, you can ban anybody. That’s just silly.
What you can ban is corporate gifts. The idea that a sitting politician can legally accept ANYTHING from ANYBODY for ANY REASON disgusts me. I don’t care if its the President’s birthday or the Congressman’s wedding aniversery or Christmas at the Senator’s house. Politicians should not be allowed to receive gifts. Period. No plane trips. No vacation junkets. No silver tea sets. No complimentary dinners. No pure-breed puppies. No pre-paid telephone cards. No Nothin’. If you don’t think this is fair, perhaps public office isn’t the place for you. Politicians should live entirely on their own means. I live on my own means, and for well less than the six-figure salaries even a freshman Congressman receives. Congressmen get all sorts of free travel accommodations, security protections, medical coverage, and other perks any working Joe would only dream of. The idea that they need these handouts is pure crap and it needs to end.
Wilfred
Last I heard, 133 was less than 150:
Tim F.
Redhand, I think that your analysis entirely misses the fundamental reasons behind why the Dems did what they did. Lacking a veto-proof majority the Dems had the choice of either delivering no Iraq supplemental at all, which I would have supported and which I gave them hearty shit for not doing, or deliver what Bush wants and bide their time until they do have 67 votes.
I will go on pissing on half-baked critics like Gramm, Warner and Dick Lugar because if they wanted to they could change the game overnight. Instead of having to choose between two terrible options, with a few more Republicans on board the Democrats could pass whatever pullout plan they choose over the president and Joe Lieberman’s noisy objections. A real pullout could begin next month.
Instead of that, because these guys won’t do anything tangible about their politically convenient changes of the heart, the Democrats’ tactical options are exactly the same as they were before Lugar et al. opened their mouths. In fact the Dems’ options suck even worse because the supplemental has come and gone, so now Dems can either muster 67 votes or do nothing at all.
I have clearly stated the intangible benefits of mainstreaming the opinion that Iraq is cooked and done, but that does not excuse the practical cowardice of their position.
Punchy
I think Redhand is Redhawk, who is Darrell, who is written by Stormy on 3-day bender.
Tim F.
Punchy, tell me you’re kidding. Darrell never talks about the teevee, Redhawk doesn’t insult anything other than my intelligence and Redhand isn’t even (as far as I know) a Bush fan.
jake
When you consider that doctors have survived the government ban on 99.9% of freebies from medical suppliers (they can still give out note pads, pens … that’s about it), the “Waaaah it’s not faaaaair! I neeeeeed, my all expenses paid trip to Cancun!” argument falls apart. Of course when you look at the penalties for violating those rules, you can see why the corps and the congress critters would prefer the “Honor System,” AKA The “Trust Me system.”
Pb
Who was the loser who always attacked Tim F. for the hell of it? Redhand reminds me of that, but only after getting bludgeoned unconscious with Al Maviva’s dictionary.
ThymeZone
Yeah, at least try to be serious. First of all, lobbying is as old as government, and is a feature of every form of government. In America, it’s clrealy a freedom of speech issue, and it absolutely is never going away.
Reform, sunshine laws, regulation, and other measures will help. What will also help is citizen activism. If you doubt that, just look at what people stupid enough to believe in a 6000-year-old earth, and the Rapture, have managed to do to government in just a couple of decades.
Rather than let the stupid people have the power, it behooves the non stupid people to step up and get involved. That’s your antidote, not “banning” lobbying, for crissakes.
Punchy
Can anyone tell me where in the Bible this 6K fig comes from? What book, what quote says this?
Tim F.
Since the Bible lists the patrilineal line all the way from Adam to Jesus, a theologian in the middle ages was able to estimate the age at which each father had a baby (the early people tended to live a while) and figure out the total number of years since Adam. The sum came out to just under 6k.
ThymeZone
Pb, this is about “Young Earth” Creationism.
canuckistani
It comes from sitting down with a pen and paper and adding up all the ages of the characters in the Bible up until you get the number you want.
Rome Again
Punchy,
It’s an amalgamation of the seven days of creation in Genesis and the “a day is as a thousand years” scripture in 2 Peter 3:8, which states that one of God’s days is like a thousand years to us.
Wilfred
That explains how one day of Bush’s presidency feels like a bad year multiplied by a thousand.
Redhand
You got that right.
I think we disagree in degree, Tim F. I blame both parties for the failure to do anything about Iraq at this point. The Democrats are at a disadvantage trying to legislate war policy, and Republican defectors should do much, much more. But I fear the Congress collectively wants to sit on its ass, waiting for
GidotPetraeus in September. And even that will be just more fruitless “debate.” Meanwhile, hundreds of Iraqis die with each passing week (100+ yesterday alone) while Americans die by twos and threes every day.It should be obvious to even a complete idiot (like our President) that the “strategy” is failing wholesale. But we’re going to keep on doing this till the Dems get 67 in November 2008 and we get a new Democratic President in office in Jan 2009. I don’t see any other way out, though I hope I’m wrong.
demimondian
Give the man a cookie. The 6K figure comes from the so-called Ussher chronology.
Rome Again
So, if it is ever finally disproven, can we call it the fall of the louse [v.] of Ussher?
Rome Again
Which should make the whole thing suspect. Humans do not live to be 5, 6, or 7 hundred years old.
Mora Merlot
Reinstitute the draft and drafy Congress first. They’ll be in greater unison than the heavenly choir about ending this shit.
demimondian
Clever, but I’m afraid Steven Jay Gould beat you to it; one of his essays was entitled “Fall in the House of Ussher”. It’s a clever pun on Ussher and on Livingston’s exegesis on the date and time of the actual creation (October 22rd, at midnight, with humans being created at nine AM on the 23rd.)
Punchy
I know asking Jesus Freaks to consider logic is like asking a stripper for her cell number…Has anyone ever asked these Junior Jesuses how women came to be? Eve had two sons. So where the white women at?
Also….doesn’t the bible say Solomon lived to be 500 years old? How many of these hexa-octagenerians are accounted for?
Undeniable Liberal
They sure are now starting to talk the walk….but they will never walk it….guaranteed, they learned well from Arlen Specter
CaseyL
I think Eve had daughters which, being female, don’t rate a named credit in the Biblical.
Or maybe the boys went after some sheep, and God did another miracle: “I’m having a baaaby! Your baaaby!”
jake
After Cain whacked Abel (over a sheep?) he ran off to the Land of Nod (seriously) and married a woman from that land.
This tells us either:
a) God made some back up, auxiliary people just in case the Adam & Eve thing didn’t work out.
b) More than one God made the planet and they both worked on their own projects. (Hopefully the other God isn’t too pissed that everyone ignores Him/Her.)
c) Whoever wrote this story realized he had to stick an unrelated woman in there or he’d have no way to explain the rest of us that wasn’t really gross.
d) Only a moron would believe Genesis is a complete and accurate record of the world.
You decide.
Nicole
9AM Eastern Standard Time? GMT?
Punchy
DUH! Allah made the brown people, Jesus’ Pop made the crackers, about 100 different gods went bonkers in India, and Democrats were made completely God-free, probably from a mix of primordial soup and illegalgayislamosympathizingjewhaters.
Hannity told me so, so I must believe him, b/c why would he lie?
demimondian
There was none of this wierdo time-changing back then — it was God’s Own Time. This time-changing stuff, it leads to that sex-changing stuff, you know, and God’s first Men, being manly, didn’t need none of that.
After all, God provided lots of sheep.
ConservativelyLiberal
Ok, if you could get the lobbyists ‘neutered’ so that they have a relationship similar to the one described for physicians and Pharma, I would be able to accept that. But with our politicians propensity for writing laws with loopholes that an aircraft carrier can cruise through, especially when the law pertains to $$$ and gifts that they can stuff in their pockets, there is little hope that anything effective could be passed. We need to find a way to put the average citizen and the lobbyist on equal footing. Until then, we will always come in second (or more like last) place with our politicians.
On another note anyone catch this?
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_6308408
Now we need a few dozen more to do the same. Then the self-centered politicians we elected need to grow spines half as strong as this guy has. He is all but calling for impeachment, and he makes a good case for it. But the Dems want to ‘keep the powder dry’ (read too chicken to stick their necks out).
His career may be over, but at least he is going out by taking the high road…
Talk about having a pair that clangs… My hat is off to him, he has earned it.
Redhand
Happily, it looks like I am wrong, and that the Republican Senate defections are making a difference. Check out this article in today’s NYT White House Debate Rises on Iraq Pullback.
I pray this is the beginning of the end.
Face
Never. Going. To. Happen. This Prez will never, ever leave Iraq while in office. Even if Congress passes a law requiring it, Bush will claim Article II gives him an “inherent right” to ignore that law.
You heard it here first.
Zifnab
If you want to read the Bible in the more figurative and metaphorical context, Adam and Eve weren’t the first man and woman, but the first tribe in Isreal. Their children, Cain and Abel, were spliter tribes – one a tribe of herders and another a tribe of farmers. One day, in a fit of pique, the farmers rose up and slew their herder neighbors. Then they were driven from the land out of shame and went to the “land of Nod” where other humans lived, just outside the tribal structure.
That, of course, assumes you’re reading the Bible metaphorically. And since we’re suggesting the Earth is 6000 years old because of a about twenty words of Biblical context, we are clearly not reading the Bible metaphorically. So fuck it. People who want to be that deliberately ignorant can’t be helped.
jake
Wait a minute. Why is Mr. Bush making this call? I thought we had a War Czar and Petraeus to make such calls. And hasn’t he accused the Democrats of second guessing and micromanaging the generals?
[Gasp!]
Goodness me. Could it be The President views this entire war is nothing more than a big political video game??
chopper
according to most biblical scholars, the old age thing was a sign of respect. saying someone lived 600 years was a way of venerating them.
which i guess means methuselah must’ve been loved by all.
chopper
when i first read the story of cain and abel, i thought it was a metaphor from a clever bible writer, telling the reader ‘don’t take all the stuff that follows too seriously. here’s a story of a guy who wanted favor with god so badly he sacrificed the one thing he loved more than anything else in the world, his own brother’.
thing is, 2 chapters later, you see abram become favored by god because he was willing to put a knife to his only child, so that theory was right out.
mostly i think its a semi-historical metaphor about the beginnings of civilization and the tensions between farmers and herders. agriculture created settlements created cities and herders were always getting in trouble letting their livestock graze on farmers land, especially in times of drought etc (farmers weren’t slaves to the climate as much as herders were) given that herders need more land than farmers do to get by.
thing is, we’re still seeing such things today. the spark that ignited the conflict in darfur was essentially herders coming into farmers’ land after losing grazing land due to shifts in local climate. its cain and abel all over again.
Punchy
Fixed.
Chad N. Freude
At exactly what time on which day did God say to Bush “Thou shalt cut and run but call it something else.”
Comrade Mattski
I believe it happened on the 13th day of Smarch at 9:04 PM
The Other Steve
It’s called Declaring Victory.
Or what did the bird say to the other bird?
Let’s get the Flock out of here!
The Other Steve
John Cole,
Join us! We are launching a blog to support Cindy Sheehan!
She’s already been endorsed by Grover Norquist and Rush Limbaugh.
Chad N. Freude
From the NYTimes article referenced above:
(1) “It depends on what the meaning of
‘is’‘precipitous’ is.”(2) We remain steadfast. We just recalibrate our message.
Zifnab
Didn’t she saw she was going to bow out gracefully from political discourse because it disgusted her and made her cry? Seriously, wtf? Talk about a flip-flopper.
Rome Again
Yeah, and look where that quaint practice got us today? It’s all lies I tell ya. Damned lies!
Respecting people who lived so long ago their bones are completely disintegrated now has given us an entire loon class of citizens who swear the earth is only 6k. Gimme a break!
Zifnab
Hardly. Tony Perkins isn’t exactly geriatric. Neither is Ralph Reed. There are no shortage of young con artists. They just haven’t laid down the foundation of their game quite like the dinosaurs Dobson and Robertson.
The Other Steve
Did you read that dKos diary? She’s flipped out and clearly needs the help of a psychologist. I’ve seen this before, a combination of exhaustion and depression causes you to search for conflict rather than working to resolve it.
John Bode
Term limits are not the answer. Neither is banning lobbyists, or imposing more ethics guidelines, or any of a thousand other ideas that have been tossed up over the years.
The fault lies not within our elected officials, but within ourselves. Quite frankly, we have the government we deserve, and until the majority of the American public starts taking its civic responsibility seriously (read: voting for someone based on something other than hairstyle), nothing will change.
What’s wrong with term limits?
We already have them. They’re called elections. It is not the fault of the system that the electorate can’t be bothered to do its job.
Its primary justification is to get the other guy’s representative out of office. Back in the late ’80s I remember everyone around here (South/Central Texas) was anxious to be rid of Ted Kennedy or Jesse Helms, but nobody seemed to have a problem with Jake Pickle serving 16 consecutive terms in the House.
What if my guy is doing a good job? What if he is vigorously protecting my interests? Why should I not be able to send that same person back after more than two terms, and instead have to pick someone who may not represent me as well? In short, what right do you have to tell who I can and cannot vote for?
If a politician knows his time is limited, he’s going to spend that time networking and making contacts and granting favors so that he’ll have a cushy job by the time he’s forced out. The notion that being freed from re-election concerns means he can concentrate on legislating is a comfortable fiction, but fiction nevertheless.
Democracy is supposed to be an active, participatory process, requiring an engaged citizenry. Artificial term limits work against that by attempting to put democracy on autopilot. IOW, we stop having to be vigilant.
People either don’t really want it or don’t really understand what it means. How else do you explain a nearby municipality voting to limit city councilmen to 2 terms, while at the same time electing one councilman to a third term (by large enough margins that a sizable group voted for both)?
The problems we’ve been having over the last 25 years or so cannot be fixed by new laws; they can only be fixed by whacking the electorate with the world’s largest clue stick.
sglover
In other words, George “Empty Suit” Bush, in his 2000 marketing campaign.
Ah, but you forget that when you’re talking about strategy, you need to consider whose eyes you’re looking through. For American interests, and Iraqis’, the “strategy” has been a disaster since the day we launched this ongoing war crime. But from the perspective of the Washington regime, the criteria are different. Their only concern, now, is to orbit in a holding pattern, so that the really difficult decisions will fall on their successors — who they will blame, at EVERY opportunity, for “losing” Iraq.
Punchy
I think it’s more like she’s looking at all the zeros in her bank account, seeing the divorce papers on the table, hearing the incessant Fox News and John Cole ridicule, and feeling like she’s wasted a lot to get effective little.
Shorter–she realizes that she’s been left behind, and for the sacrifice she’s made, she cannot accept this.
Magic 8-Ball
Quick, someone send Turkey flowers. And candy.
I love Iraq’s response: We’re busy with a real war here old chap, do be a good fellow and settle down.
HyperIon
dear brutus!