Ramblin' Man
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Posted by James Wolcott
01.20.05 9:49AM
jameswolcott.com
I don't have time to organize my "thoughts" into a necklace of pellucid pearls (for the benefit of some of you slower students, that's what's known as Irony), so I'm just going to ramble.
First thing I heard this morning was Howard Fineman on Imus declaring that Brit Hume was "a terrific journalist." Ah, the brotherhood of hacks--I wonder if they have their secret handshake. Fineman went on to scoff at John Kerry's vote against Condi's confirmation as an empty gesture, but I have more respect for Kerry's gesture, futile though it may be, than I do Joe Biden's windmill arm action and posturing. He makes a big show of saying that he has little faith in Rice being anything other than Bush's translator and message-machine--that he hoped she would be a firm advocate for the State Department rather than simply a loyalist, but that his instincts told him this was unlikely--and then voted for her anyway!
Biden is like a slugger who never quite gets good wood on the ball, no innuendo intended. He gets into the batter's box, scuffs up the dirt with his cleats, gets settled, takes practice strokes, and--here comes the pitch--lets rip with a mighty swing...and pops up. Again and again, he goes through his Rocky Calavito rituals, and each time he hits an infield fly.
I don't pretend to comprehend the retractable spines of so many Democrats. Poll after poll shows that a majority of the American people now thinks the invasion of Iraq was unwarranted, a mistake, not worth the cost in lives and money. What's striking about the LA Times poll is that only 4% support sending in more troops to get the job done. Increasingly, the American people don't think this war is worth it and want Out.
And yet I'm still seeing elected Democrats saying that, even with what they know now (no WMDs, no real postwar planning), they still would have voted to authorize the war.
Knuckleheads.
Imagine you were persuaded to invest heavily in a business venture. They drew quite a picture for you of future prospects, made big promises. Over the course of three years, you learned that your business partners had conned you (and perhaps conned themselves), the contractors were corrupt, and the neighborhood that you were assured would welcome you with a marching band and hula dancers was firing sniper shots at your windows and trying to burn down the building. You lost your original investment, and pumped in more money to keep the venture going, only to lose that too, and to keep losing, with no end in sight, smoke rising in every direction.
Under those circumstances, knowing what you now know, would you say, "Yes, I still believe investing in Rathole Unlimited was the right thing to do"?
If you were Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill), you would.
MR. RUSSERT: You voted--you said you would have voted for the war if you had been in Congress.
REP. EMANUEL: Right.
MR. RUSSERT: Now, knowing that are no weapons of mass destruction, would you still have cast that vote?
REP. EMANUEL: Yes. Well, you could have done--well, as you know, I didn't vote for it. I still believe that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do, OK? But how you go about it and how you execute that war is the problems we face today.
That's become the talking point for a number of liberalish Democrats, to say it was right to go to war, what's wrong is the way the war has been conducted.
Never mind what I think, that a war waged on false pretenses and false premises is always wrong. If a majority of the American people can now admit the original decision was a mistake, why can't Democrats? When are they going to stop hitting popflies? |
