The Democratic Congress' Fatal Self-Deception
I give you my dear friend Kenny Pierce with yet another gem:
"If Fred Thompson doesn't have all the other Presidential pretenders quaking in their boots -- especially the charmless Hillary -- then they're way too bloody stupid to be running the country. His take-down of Michael Moore was masterful in about half a dozen different ways.
Meanwhile the Democratic Congress continues on its suicidal path toward the destruction of its own party. I can't remember in which on-line forum I said, shortly after the mid-term elections, that I thought the Democrats' apparent success would turn out to be a disaster for them, and that Hillary's candidacy had just taken a major hit. My reasoning was that the Congress, being rendered stupid by their hatred of Dubya, would take entirely the wrong lesson from those elections, and would proceed to spend the next two years making it absolutely clear that no matter how bad an idea it is to give Republicans power, giving Democrats power is, mirabilu dictu, an EVEN WORSE idea.
And the Democrats are playing out the script exactly as written.
See, when those elections came in, suddenly everywhere you turned the Democrats were talking about their "mandate," and specifically they were claiming that they had a mandate "to end the war." Now, let's set aside the fact that the Congressional elections were not, in fact, a referendum on the war, and that the Constitution (which the Dubya-terrified insist that Dubya wishes to undermine) certainly does not say that if the opposition party wins control of Congress during a war, then Congress is authorized to usurp the power and function of the executive branch. (When you hear a Democrat complaining about Dubya's attempts to behave un-Constitutionally, ask them if they object to Nancy Pelosi's blatant attempts to pursue a shadow foreign policy in direct opposition to and subversion of the President's foreign policy. Nobody who supports what Pelosi did has any business pretending that it's Constitutional checks and balances they're out to defend.) Let's pretend for the sake of argument that the only issue that anybody in America took into account in casting their Congressional vote this last time around, was the war. What, then, is the real mandate?
I'll tell you what it is. The mandate is not to stop waging the war. The mandate is to stop screwing around getting nothing accomplished like Bush and Rumsfeld and Co. have spent the last four years s-a-g-n-a. The American people thought that if Bush was allowed to just keep on muddling along and pretending that Rumsfeld was right and you could conquer the world with six National Guardsman, a K-9 unit, and a bunch of high-tech equipment, then we'd continue right on with the slow bleed of Iraq and never get anywhere.
But you can feel that way about Bush for two different reasons. You can feel that way because you want to bail out and clear out of Iraq the way we did in Vietnam -- that is, you can feel that way because you either don't believe we can win or else never wanted us to in the first place, and you can want to give up and leave. Or you can feel that way precisely because you want to actually win the war, not just pretend we're winning it. And if you wanted to win the war back in the last election, back when Rumsfeld was still in control rather than Petraeus...well, I think most of us felt that without a major change in course, Bush wasn't going to get it done.
Thus even if the Democrats were right to believe that the country had rejected Bush's Iraq policy, it didn't at all follow that the nation was embracing the Democrats'. As hard as it is for Democrats to get into their minds, most Americans prefer winning wars to losing them, and most of us would still prefer to win in Iraq. Most of us don't want to replace Dubya with leaders who will say, "Okay, we lost, let's go home." Most of us either want to keep Dubya because we still think he'll eventually clue in and get the war won, or else we want to replace him with a leader who will actually win the war.
And that's all true even if we make it easy on the "mandate"-brandishers by allowing them to ignore the highly relevant facts that (a) the war was not by any means the only issue on the table in the mid-terms, (b) in the one district where it was absolutely and without question the dominant issue in the race, the notoriously Red-State voters of Connecticut bitch-slapped the Democratic anti-war nutroots, and (c) the swing Democrats whose election gave the Democrats temporary control of Congress, did so by distancing themselves from the Howard Dean / Dennis Kucinich wing of the party.
So the Congressional Democratic leadership has joyfully embarked on pursuing its imaginary "mandate." And what's the result?
[chuckling] Well, it hasn't taken long for their efforts to start bearing precisely the fruit I expected. The nation as a whole doesn't think very much of Bush as a President. But we the nation think better of Bush as a President than we think of the Democrats as a Congress.
Well done, Pelosi & Co. Any time you want to join the real world, feel free...but, see, trouble is, you can't join the real world without getting rid of the Bush-hate-goggles. So do you lust after the hatred more than you desire success? Because in the long run you can't have both."
Posted by Alexandra von Maltzan on Friday, May 18, 2007 at
allthingsbeautiful.com |
