For any number of reasons, this seemed like a particularly depressing week in U.S. politics.
FAILED EXECUTIVE
The Nation continued on with its failed President, who seems blithely unaware that he created a war in Iraq with the possibility that he cannot finish it, that he and his probably created more of a terrorist threat than he has so far contained, let alone attenuated or destroyed.
His latest 'supplemental appropriation', which some have called a death warrant for another X number of soldiers, will likely bring the war past the point at which his reckless pursuit of what he called 'the war on terror' and 'fighting offense' and 'fighting over there (as if that were an advantage)' will have cost more American lives than those lost on 9/11.
Even after the clear inefficacy of bombing Hezbollah last summer, comes plausible word this week the implacable Mr. Cheney would like to bomb Iran. While the world's opinion is galvanized against Iran and they sow the seeds of their own demised with their recent kidnappings, it comes to light that the CIC probably just sowed our inability to tell any kind of law-and-order counternarrative of our own by authorizing our own variety of "diablo" on them, with an old-world style CIA black-ops campaign (yes, that was a reference to Chavez, who held up the chronicle of our little black-book of secrets at the U.N. just recently). Way to fight anti-Americanism, Mr. President - send in the CIA, unbound ...
Last, against the backdrop of an 'illegal' war, which is great fuel to the jihadi narrative, comes increasing evidence of an Administration so self-assured that it was willing to go to war against Saddam without a corroborating intelligence estimate of a clear and present danger.
FAILED OPPOSITION AND CONGRESS
Against the backdrop of an unpopular President and an unpopular wartime prosecution, the Congress was yet again unable to firmly face-up to the quagmire costs of ending the war, one way or another.
Even if one agrees that honest people can disagree about terminating the conflict and when, the meme that appears to have carried the day is fear of appearing to not 'fund our troops'. This attitude continues to 'shock and awe' me. Since when has the making of peace and war been tied to respecting or disrespecting the troops? How can it be that all peacekeeping and stabilization activities are perpetual, out of respect of doing no harm to the troops?
Surely, the Democratic caucus should have hived off and voted an appropriation to demobilize the troops. Afterall, we the taxpayers, via our Congress, pre-authorized a 'victory party' for OIF, as it was put forward in one of the prior appropriation requests. If something that odd can be funded, then surely we can appropriate the money to bring the troops home, so there isn't this bogus question of them being stranded in the desserts of Iraq.
The democratic leadership look like they don't understand how to calculate, agree or rhetorically defend a maximum bargaining position, so they have ended with nothing much except maybe pulling the field of Democratic nominee hopefuls to the left. But even that isn't completely true.
To get the appropriation passed, we ended up with Democratic pork in the bill, instead of Republican pork. Yee-haw!
And, to rub salt in the wound, the President was never once, that I know, asked to actually pay for his FOURTH 'supplemental' appropriation, to submit even as much as a plan to do so. Coupled with implications of an all-volunteer force, we have four years of sacrifice-free war for non-military families (something that Milton Friedman probably never envisioned in his marginal analysis).
The Dems are now fully complicit in tax freedom-to-fund and the voters don't have any choice, because of our hamstrung two party system that allows us to shuttle back-and-forth between the bad governance of the two wings on the business party, as Chomsky put it once. (Early analysis suggests that the Chinese trade negotiators earned their keep this week, too).
BAD LEGISLATION
Meanwhile, Ted Kennedy continues to defend the bogus looking immigration compromise (one report had him convince Senator Akaka not to vote for the amendment that would have ditched the seriously flawed 'temporary work' provisions). I'll look around, but it doesn't seem like anything much has been elucidated as to why this bill is worthy, apart from the empty assurance that this is the best that can be got.MORAL DISCOURAGE
Last, the White House released a bizarrely composed photo of VP Cheney and his wife with Mary and Heather's newborn son (and latest heir to the Cheney-Haliburton fortune), although the two parents were no where to be seen. It is perhaps the crowning artistic expression of this administration's "Where's Waldo?" approach to gays and lesbians in the nation.The Hebrew "Samuel", conventionally meaning 'asked of God', is a beautiful choice for the child, but is somehow a delusion if you ask, say, Family Scholars' swells.
