Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing
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When I was three years old, my parents let me watch the Wizard of Oz. A wholesome movie, right? Holy crap did it terrify me. I made my parents inspect the closet every night before bed because I knew, I JUST KNEW those damn flying monkeys were in there. I could hear them scratching around – digging for scraps of mortal flesh and since they hadn’t gotten to me yet, I knew they were HUNGRY!
One full year later, I was able to go to bed with the lights off.
So here we are, ten months into the so-called Democratic Revolution and Pelosi and Reid have accomplished damn near nothing. The only thing they can chalk up is the pitifully small increase in the minimum wage. We are still in Iraq, a war criminal is still running the country and we haven’t regained our civil rights. I have heard the hand-wringing apologists for the Dems – the excuses about a one vote majority in the Senate, the Blue Dog Democrats that are infesting the House of Representatives and the biggest whopper, “impeachment wouldn’t be good for the nation.”
Last Summer and Fall, I ran all around the district telling people the Dems were going to act on their agenda and by electing Dems we would get our country back. Sadly, what I didn’t realize, we would also need to get rid of the Dems that are IN Congress to get our PARTY back.
Gonzales is off the table and gone. Now can we get back to the war crimes at hand? Can we get out of Iraq? Can we maybe get our rights back?
I have no inkling as to why the Dems are continuing to fund the war and most recently, agreed to let Bush continue to abuse the FISA courts. Who is even letting these bills come to the damn floor? If I knew this crap was going on, I would NOT have been knocking on doors for months and months last year in an effort to get these sorry individuals in power.
The Dems got voted into power about 10 months ago. When will they come out from under the bed? When will they overcome their fear? When will they begin to govern?
It took me a year to conquer my fear of the flying monkeys and I was three years old. I hope the Democrats get their act together soon, our soldiers are dying on the battlefield while Pelosi cries under her bed.
I should mention that I generally like your work.
This one is superlative!
When will they overcome their fear? When will they begin to govern?
As far as they are concerned they are governing. They think they know what’s good for us better than we do. They get their sense of how the US should run its foreign affairs not from the American people, but from the foreign policy elite. And there consists a bipartisan consensus among that elite that the US cannot afford to get out of Iraq. There are two main reasons for that. The first is control over oil. The second is that getting out of Iraq would lead to a marked reduction of US power in the Middle East. Since Israel depends on US power, the Israel lobby is dead set against withdrawal. Nowadays it is virtually unheard of for a congressman to defy the Israel lobby on an issue that it is firm about.
At this point, the only kind of withdrawal that is being contemplated is ending “major combat operations” and so reducing the number of combat troops, with the rest hunkering down in the new megabases.
I also think that a major reason why impeachment is off the table is that the Israel lobby must be against that too, given that Bush is the first American president not to restrain Israel at all, and that it wants him to attack Iran before he leaves office.
One can still ask why Congress caved to Bush in May, given that the “withdrawal” provisions were so minimal. The only thing I can think of is that that might have gotten some momentum going, and shown that Congress does have real power. Their strategy has become pretty transparent by now. They deride what Bush is doing, but pretend they can do nothing about it. For them, it’s a win/win strategy. They tacitly favor most of what Bush is doing, but pretend they don’t, to keep on getting our votes.