So You Thought They’d End the War
By DAVID VEST
Welcome to the Show, kid.
The Democrats have “surrendered” on Iraq. Liberals are “shocked.” And all the innocents who didn’t know any better, didn’t see it coming, feel “betrayed.”
Poor Duncan Black, better known as “Atrios,” is nearly at a loss for words: “People hate Bush, hate Republicans, and hate this war,” he protests, and yet the Democrats caved!
“I don’t understand these people,” he wails.
Precisely.
Keith Olbermann, using the same tone of humorless, near-postal anger he uses in every commentary, no matter the topic, calls the Democratic rollover a “Neville Chamberlain moment.”
I prefer to think of it as a teachable moment.
At a time when even conservatives have come to loathe Bush, when people who thought he was going to round up all the “illegal aliens” and deport them are so upset, they think impeachment’s too good for him, the Democrats labor to craft legislation “acceptable” to him.
Liberals have already spent six and a half years loathing Bush — longer if they live in Texas, a state whose statutes are said to recognize two classes of persons: Fuckors and Fuckees.
(Republicans and Democrats, the big shots, belong to the former class. You and I belong to the latter.)
There is nothing particularly wrong with loathing Bush. It only becomes a problem when it prevents progressives from finally figuring out that the people they’re really going to end up having to fight are the Democrats.
As Big Walter the Thunderbird used to say, “Sho’ is tough.”
Right now, both major parties are playing dodge ball with the planet, trying to avoid “ownership” of Iraq. The only way at this point to “own” the war is to stop it, and there is no serious move afoot to make that happen.
Having used antiwar sentiment, and disgust over Katrina, to regain control of Congress, the Democrats have no intention of relinquishing power. They all “support the troops,” who are being asked to “lay down their lives for America” in far Mesopotamia — but you didn’t expect these people you elected to lay down their political careers for the good of the country … did you?
Read the rest here.
