Redstate

By streiff Posted in Congress — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

For most of my junior high and high school years I attended a school in rural southside Virginia. There were limited options available for field trips so every year, sure as the rising of the sun, we would visit Maymont Park in Richmond.

Nothing against Maymont, it’s a nice park. But as you grew older there was progressively less there to hold your interest. Aside from the opportunity to slip off for a headache producing make-out session with your honey du jour the big attraction was THE MONKEY.

Every kid, in every class, knew that if you gathered in front of the monkey’s cage (and I sadly note that according to the Maymont website they no longer have monkeys) and started making monkey noises and jumping around and made faces the monkey would become progressively exercised until he eventually would defecate in his hand and throw the product at passers-by.

Now if you were one of the miscreants agitating the monkey this was a real hoot and posed no real risk. You knew what was coming, kept a weather eye out for the tell tale signs, and scooted out of range before you were decisively engaged. If you were strolling through the park with your family and blundered into the battle of wits underway between a dozen or so adolescent males and a monkey it could have an unfortunate outcome.

When I watched the performance of the House Armed Services Committees and the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday I was reminded on nothing so much as an agitated troop of monkeys trying to wreak vengeance on their tormentors.

Read on.

[Neil] Abercrombie, D-Urban Honolulu, said during a House hearing today that the president's plan to put an extra 21,500 U.S. troops in Iraq was "the craziest, dumbest plan I have ever seen or heard of in my life.

Great insight, there, Clausewitz. What’s your plan?

"I've gone along with the president on this, and I bought into his dream," Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) told Rice bluntly. "And at this stage of the game, I don't think it's going to happen."

No mention of whether or not Voinovich blubbering like a little girl sans teddy bear. Washington is where dreams go to die, George.

At the House Armed Services Committee hearing, it was standing-room-only. In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a Republican who has been critical of the administration's handling of the war, drew applause when he described the president's proposals as a "dangerous foreign policy blunder," and vowed to oppose them. Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat and a vigorous opponent of the war, spoke of it as "quite possibly the greatest foreign policy mistake in the history of our nation."

We’ve already discussed the haplessly addled Chuck Hagel. Despite the hyperbole one has to at least give Feingold props for being loudly and consistently wrong. Feingold and Hagel are right in one respect, a blunder is being made but they are the authors of that blunder.

While great theater none of this means anything because the people exciting the monkeys knew what was going to happen long before they visited the monkey cage. The Congress lacks the guts to even vote on withdrawing funding for the war or on a reauthorization for the use of military force in Iraq. Instead you have a the unseemly spectacle of members of Congress, of both parties, calling names and blustering. On one side of the aisle they are doing this to play to the antiwar left that elected them. On the other side you have the coalition of the fearful, like John Sununu and Norm Coleman, and the feckless running like scalded dogs from an effort by the Administration to achieve victory in a critical conflict.
The president will deploy troops and Mitch McConnell can probably corral the 40 votes necessary to prevent any Congressional action. The war will go on.

The innocent bystanders who are going to experience a veritable deluge of monkey poo in the near future are the soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors putting their lives on the line in a righteous cause.

At a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, invoking Martin Luther King Jr., urged party members against timidity. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a quiet, hawkish supporter of the war, stunned many of his colleagues when he came out strenuously against Bush's proposal and suggested the war is no longer militarily winnable.

John P. Murtha, the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense and the party's leading voice for withdrawing troops, is to report back to Appropriations Committee members today on hearings and legislative language that could stop an escalation of troops.

Those plans could attach so many conditions and benchmarks to the funds that it would be all but impossible to spend the money without running afoul of the Congress. "Twenty-one thousand five hundred troops ought to have 21,500 strings attached to them," said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.).

This is the way moral cowards behave. Allow the troops to be sent into harm’s way and then connive to create enough hurdles that they can’t succeed.

We saw this played out in 1973 and 1974 as a Democrat congress progressively increased restrictions on the use of Defense Department funds to prevent first US troops and eventually US equipment from making its way to South Vietnam delivering that nation and two of its neighbors into decades of darkness and horror under communist rule.

We saw it again in 1982 as the Boland Amendment, which author is presumably dividing his time between the Eighth and Ninth Circles of Hell, attempted to deliver Central America into the hands of various Havana-oriented insurgencies.

What is particularly odious is that while the Republicans in question can at least appeal to base cowardice as justification, the Democrats see this as part of their electoral strategy. According to David Ignatius:

The secret for the Democrats, says Emanuel, is to remain the party of reform and change. The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen. Don't look to Emanuel's Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It's Bush's war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.