As we crawl into the afternoon on Wednesday, the question of whether pushing the Republicans into an actual filibuster has brought any results to the floor.
I have always felt that part of a debate/discussion was to be persuasive… to present the facts and show why something should be changed. The Democrats did this pretty well all night. I heard facts presented, weighed, evaluated and a reasonable course of action, ie: Reed-Levin, promoted.
I heard the Republicans (and Joe Lieberman, of course) using attack lines like “cut and run” (not at all a part of Reed-Levin), “total pullout” (also not a part of Reed-Levin”), “cowardice”, “losers” and just about every other slander they could come up with, often acknowledging that the first few years of the war had been mishandled… but so what?
At the end of the run there seem to still be only 3 Republicans behind the amendment… the same as at the start of debate.
What has come out of this is a clear message to majority of the American people who want the troops to be brought home: as long as Bush occupies the white house, Mitch MacConnell and his minions will keep their lips firmly planted on the President’s behind.
Under The LobsterScope
The point, I believe, was to raise the cost of the filibuster. The Repukeliscum have filibustered 48 measures thus far. If every one of these was required to go through 30 hours of debate, that would require 64 full 24-hour days. If I were Reid, I would be informing the Repukeliscum that EVERY measure filibustered would require 30 hours of debate before the cloture vote would be scheduled.
At the end of the day, it had no substantive benefit. Only removing Bush and Cheney from office would result in a change in policy in Iraq, and perhaps not even then.
We are discovering the limits of our current form of government, which is a democracy in name only. What we really have is a fight every four years over which party gets too milk the federal government for favors to its supporters, with both parties heavily reliant on corporate money to maintain their infrastructure. Are the Republicans worse? Yes, but the Democrats are hardly a progressive party of the people at this point in time. The evidence for that can be seen by the two frontrunners for the Dem nomination in 2008, both of whom are the largest benefactors of corporate money among their fellow competitors, and both of whom preach a centrist message (i.e., conservative re: business issues, mildly progressive on social issues) while throwing the occasional rhetorical bone to progressives to keep them pacified.
We will only leave Iraq, in the final analysis, when the corporations decide their interests are being harmed by continuing to stay there and there is nothing further to gain. By that time we will have destroyed our Army as an effective fighting force for a generation. Expect our future wars to become even more air power centric than they already are.