Joe Lieberman has promised to join a Republican filibuster. Now Sen. Ben Nelson says he isn’t going for anything that looks like PelosiCare:
“Well, first of all, it has more than a robust public option, it’s got a totally government-run plan, the costs are extraordinary associated with it, it increases taxes in a way that will not pass in the Senate and I could go on and on and on,” Nelson said in an interview that is part of ABC News’ Subway Series with Jonathan Karl. “Faced with a decision about whether or not to move a bill that is bad, I won’t vote to move it,” he added. “For sure.” The $1.1 trillion price tag on the House bill, Nelson said, is “absolutely” too high.
It seems as though the House Democrats who walked the plank may now, as on cap-and-trade, be hung out to dry if their efforts are now portrayed as the unacceptable, pie-in-the-sky handiwork of the party’s far Left. We’ll see if Nelson has company among other Red State senators who don’t think voting for PelosiCare is good for their political health.
This is a perceptive post, and undoubtedly there are some Democratic leaders wise enough to perceive its wisdom. Unfortunately they are all located at the DLC, and that is not home anymore for a Democratic leader who wants to be president (or simply avoid a primary challenge). The netroots now run the party and dictate positions to candidates unwilling to object, even if both national interests and sound political strategy would suggest otherwise.
“In view of these hopeful assessments, it would be criminally irresponsible to deny Petraeus”. . .
Not to be picky or anything here, but it would still be criminally irresponsible to deny our forces the opportunity to do the job, even if this aforementioned handful of people still held no hope for the war.
What Joshua Muravchik writes is wise, but unlikely to convince Democrats in Congress. The plight of Senator Lieberman illustrates in bold relief the total demise of the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic Party, that may have provided some bipartisan support for the President’s brave and necessary war. Alas, Howard Dean is more reliable bellweather for the sentiment of Democrats on this subject. Also, the President can handle the Democrat’s neuralgic opposition, if the surge continues to show progress. What we should fear most is the unrealistic realism of the Baker Commission making a revival. Neither Brent Scowcroft nor James Baker will ever comprehend the importance of regime change in the Middle East that addresses the real root cause of this war.
May President Bush have the fortitude to say the course.
The job will not be complete without some serious changes in policy in Washington.
Afghanistan will not be pacified until we destroy the jihadists in the Northwest Frontier Province. We have to end the exemption that is extended to the stone age tribes in the tribal areas. The world has allowed Pakistan to tolerate their lawlessness for far too long. Those creatures actually think they’re entitled to their lawless, tribal ways.
They need to get hammered. They need to get the same tutorial that we inflicted to the German, to the Japanese, to whoever needed it.
Nor will become tranquil, not until we remove the regime in Tehran.
It’s a maxim of counterinsurgency warfare, that you cannot allow the enemy sanctuary. We’re allowing the enemy sanctuary, in the NWFP, in Iran and Syria.
We allowed the enemy sanctuary in Cambodia, in Thailand and in North Vietnam.
If we’re serious, our war efforts will be allowed to naturally expand throughout the true battlespace.
If we’re not serious, if we’re willing to allow the arabists to dictate how we wage this war, then failure is foreordained.
So it’s real simple.
We either purge the arabists, wage the war, go after our enemies, thoroughly pound them, and cut the politically correct nonsense, …………………… or …………………………. we succumb to the dark, satanic vision of our enemy.
We will destroy jihadism, we will completely rip it from the fabric of islam, thus completely changing islam forever, just like we changed the antebellum South, just like we changed militaristic Japan, just like we changed Germany, ………………………………………….. or we will lose.
And taking a glance at our pusillanimous war effort, is there any doubt which way the trend lines are moving?
Iraq is a place where if we are defeated, it will prove decisive against us.
BUT IF WE win, if we prevail, it will not prove a decisive defeat of our enemy. It will prove a setback, a hurdle, it will pose enormous problems for them, but it won’t prove decisive.
Where is the nexus that we must strike?
Where are the important political, cultural, economic and religious sites that islam must protect, otherwise be forever changed?
Where can we deal a blow, as we dealt the South, the Japanese and the German, where can we deal a blow so telling, so ferocious, that none will challenge us thereafter?
I think we know where.
But we’re frightened of where those thoughts lead.
This war is going to increase in scope, scale and ferocity. Just like our Civil War, just like The Great War, just like The Second World War. Measures that we’re not dreamed of at the commencement of hostilities, we’re commonplace by the end. And it will not prove different this time around.
The stakes dictate such growth and intensification in ferocity.
The stakes dictate the expansion in scale and scope of the war.
The stakes dictate that the West, as before in our long and glorious past, do whatever is necessary to prevail, to survive, to utterly destroy the enemy, so as to continue to cast the benign light of Western Civilization upon a fallen world.
The desires and deeds of our enemies are going to call down upon them the wrath we visited upon former enemies.
It’s going to be horrible, that’s for sure. And they’re going to leave us with no other option.
The war has become too political. Why can’t we agree that America (and the entire Western world, for that matter) faces an existential threat? These folks, as some of the previous commentators have notices, are dangerous! Wake up, we need to act now.
The change in strategy is usually thought to be political. I disagree. What is required is a change in military tactics going well beyond the necessary (but not sufficient) Surge. The French experience in Algeria, only confirmed in Vietnam, was that counterinsurgency operations are ultimately futile without sealed borders. Insurgencies cannot be “defeated” per se, but they can be strangled. The sealing must take place by some combination of border interdiction, destroying valuable assets of the supporting states, and diplomacy. No matter what the rantings of the mullahs, there is some theoretical price for their destabilization beyond which they will be unwilling to pay; likewise for the Syrians and Saudis. That Bush has made no attempt to impose these costs is a public scandal and a stain on his leadership.
It’s beyond “price.”
The house of saud played a game that resulted in 3,000 American dead.
The house of saud funds to the tune of billions of dollars, some of the most vitriolic hatred ever to corrode the breast of men.
And does so to the four winds.
The house of saud is about as evil a presence in this world, as one is apt to find.
After The Second World War, we took the leader of the Hitler Youth and strung the son of a bitch up, for crimes against humanity. His specific crime was “poisoning the mind of youth.”
Now ask yourself this, if we were determined to try and execute people in S. Arabia for “poisoning the mind of youth,” how many would we be able to indict, convict and execute?
The leader of the religious ministry, as well as his department heads, should have been demanded to be delivered over to us within days of 9/11.
Likewise the head of their intelligence service.
Likewise Bandar. It would have demonstrated that the game is over, that the ways that prevailed on September 10th, prevail no longer. Taking Bandar, he of the parties, he of the faux, urbane, Western veneer, he the one that throws petrodollars around Washington, buying love, taking him and executing him for crimes against humanity would have sent a signal.
But Bush was not about to take on the arabists.
He wasn’t about to take on the establishment.
Bush NEVER had the grit, the inner ferocity for the job.
Compare Gingrich’s speech at AEI, where he contrasted the job the military did with the failures of the State Department. Just compare that speech, the passion betrayed by that speech, with the banalities and the nostrums we get from Condi, from Nick Burns, from our muslim ambassador to the UN, from Bush himself.
It’s way beyond a stain, it’s way beyond a public scandal.
It’s a NATIONAL disgrace. It’s degeneracy, utter degeneracy.
I try to control as much as possible how much I think of this pusillanimous war effort, of this pusillanimous administration, because if I think about it too much, I get sick, I get headaches, I throw up.