Pelosi: Meeting Our Enemies, But Not Our President
By RS Insider Posted in Congress | Nancy Pelosi — Comments (23) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The RS Insider has trouble understanding why Speaker Nancy Pelosi is willing to meet with Syria’s President Assad and Iran’s President Ahmadinejad – known sponsors of terror who are currently helping kill Americans – but is unwilling to meet with President Bush, known Republican.
Democratic Leaders are arguing that, sure, they’ll meet with President Bush, but only if he drops the preconditions which are "inappropriate" because this must be "accomplished by conducting serious negotiations without any preconditions." (a demand they never made of Presidents Assad and Ahmadinejad, of course)
Where did President Bush get the idea that “preconditions” were appropriate for “serious negotiations”? I don’t’ know, but I’ve got one candidate:
Democratic Leader Harry Reid released the following statement today: … “Until the president and the Republican leadership agree that their misguided attempt to privatize Social Security is over and they will no longer pursue their previously announced bait and switch strategy, Democrats will continue to refuse to enter negotiations over Social Security. We stand ready, willing, and able to join in a conversation to strengthen Social Security but we will not stand by and allow a vehicle for privatization to make it into Conference.
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Pelosi: Meeting Our Enemies, But Not Our President 23 Comments (0 topical, 23 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
against the President. Oh that he would respond in kind.
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
It is just criticism...not bombing, shooting, taking prisoners or life threatening for President Bush.
I read from your posts that you are the proud father of a soldier. Surely you can't compare a day in the life of George Bush with a day in the life of a soldier in an actual war.
Just watch the hyperbole, thats all I'm sayin...
Democrats--elected and unelected--are sandbagging his foreign policy for their perceived political benefit and to the detriment of our soldiers, accusing him of complicity in 9/11, screaming for his impeachment and revelling in fantasies of his assassination. While this may fall short of "all-out war", it certainly goes beyond the hyperbole for which you scold mbecker. No one else here takes his "all-out war" literally, but we understand the sentiment.
And Bush's days are much harder than his. Josh not only could shoot back, he could actually shoot first when he recognized a threat.
Bush won't/doesn't. He should. No hyperbole at all. If the elected representatives of your party get their way, we will have lost the shooting war, and it won't be recoverable. Not that they care.
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Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don't.
The Dems will meet with President Bush once he goes out kills a few thousand more people. He needs to order a few suicide bombers to blow up the Mall of America. He's not terrorist enough for Pelosi and Reid and their ilk. Maybe if Bush ordered the assassinations of some leading Liberals and took some hostages, these "Patriotic" Democrats would respect him more. You see, Bush is too nice. He actually believes he can bring peace and hope to the world.
R.J.
and they will try to manipulate terrorists to achieve political victories. They are naive fools - the result will be a bloody mess - which of course they will try to blame on the Republicans.
At the core - their flawed belief in the 'basic goodness of every human' leads them to believe that they can reason with terrorist madmen. Nancy et al make Neville Chamberlain look good.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
They are meeting with THEIR President (Assad, and soon the punk from Iran) and not with THEIR enemy (Bush).
her a visa untill the funding bill is done. Then let her go and and arrest her upon return.
The aforementioned Ms Coulter opined the other day that we are too nice in war, and hence must spend more time "nation building" as a result. Of course, this is when our soldiers are the most vulnerable as it is difficult to know the friendlies from the unfriendlies. We need to make the real enemy fear us and then comply, not invite them to the touchy feely table so we can all get along!
Average Americans today do not have the stomach for real war - overseas or at home. We dearly need a President who will fight for his agenda, OUR TROOPS and our safety. If that means pulling out the stops and going to real war politically, then so be it. The metaphor applies. It is ugly, but effective.
Pelosi is doing untold harm to this nation by circumventing the President and allowing herself the prerogative of his office. What will it take for Bush to check her and her ilk?
Soldier's Mom - Golfer's Wife - Home alone a lot
will meet with Rogue nations but not with the President or FOX news, they have got to be some of the most hateful, unintelligent people I have ever seen, however I will note there are going to be a lot of great signs and bumper stickers that will come out for the 2008 elections that will utilize all this stupidity to it's finest hour.
Peace through superior fire power:)
Reid is the one who is attempting to set preconditions, not Bush. All the President did was discuss his views on the spending bill, not limit what Reid or Pelosi could say. The Democrats could offer any sort of compromise they want. Bush might say no and he might not. Talk is talk, and that is what Bush offered.
Reid however wants the President to negotiate with himself by telling the media a bunch of areas in which he will give in.
They're going anyway:
http://democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/record.cfm?id=272233
With the change in position on visiting Iran and now this, I get the feeling there's some PR wars going on behind the scenes.
The Democrats probably did insta-polling and realized that Reid made a mistake by refusing to talk to the President. Reid's comments on the announcement though are still insulting & too combative and will turn off independents. The Democrats are stuck in bash-Bush mode, which their hardcode base of voters likes, but which turns everyone else off.
I hope that the President cares about the PR war. As far as I can tell, he is just doing the same thing which he has done for a couple of years: ignore politics, but play "chicken" by digging his heels in and hoping the other guy swerves at the last minute to avoid a crash.
At the moment the President seems to be in a situation where he can use his one trick, brinkmanship, because once he vetoes enough Democrats will switch to eventually pass something. However, he should realize this is a bad situation, and it is deteriorating because the President has lost the Senate majority which he had just a few weeks ago in support of the war.
Eventually a bill needs to pass, which means the President will need to pick up votes in both houses. Instead of negotiating with the Democratic leadership, which means the liberal Democratic caucus as a whole, he would be better off winning over the straggling Republicans and a few of the most moderate Democrats. The Administration also should be running a PR campaign to build voter support for the war, which would switch Congress to his side.
The problem with the dig-in-the-heels veto trick, is that a two-thirds vote can override the veto and in some situations the enemy could get that more quickly than today's 50%-50% vote might indicate. Our troops deserve majority support, and there is no excuse for Republicans not to do everything in their power to make that happen.
Does it surprise anyone? Do I not get the distinct impression that the drive by media, and the Liberals/ Democrats see Bush as the enemy, not the Islamofascists!
Hank Williams4th
Australia
from washingtonpost.com:
Democrats, meanwhile, are making little progress reconciling differences between House and Senate versions of the war funding bill, senior party aides said. Both packages include provisions to end combat troop operations in Iraq by next year.
But the Senate's March 31, 2008, date is a goal, not a deadline -- although it does require troops to begin returning within four months. The House bill, shaped by a large faction of antiwar liberals, offers less flexibility. Leaders are expected to demand a firm date, which would prompt a veto.
Some Republicans and moderate Democrats are hoping that common ground may be found in a series of benchmarks for the Iraqi government that were laid out by the Bush administration, some of which were included in the Senate spending bill.
Although Reid suggested that Democrats would continue to insist on withdrawal language, he said he is confident that serious negotiations can yield a compromise.
I personally would just say that, were it not for the fact that President Bush has lost so much credibility (not to mention completely lacking in the media skills department), would make a concerted push to explain to people the advantages of FULLY privatizing Social Security, not the weak partial job he was proposing earlier. Wonder if that would cause the heads of Pelosi, Reid, et al. to explode...
"I could explain, but that would be very long, very convoluted, and make you look very stupid. Nobody wants that... except maybe me."
This is so far over the top. I am really more saddened than anything else, for how far this has gone. Without any proof Democratic Senator Leahy walks on the Senate floor and (without using the exact word) says that the Bush Administration lied about some subpoenaed material.
This goes to show that pacifism doesn't work. For years they called the President a liar about the war, and he never responded. Now it just grows and grows.
WASHINGTON - President Bush's aides are lying about White House e-mails sent on a Republican account that might have been lost, a powerful Senate chairman said Thursday, vowing to subpoena those documents if the administration fails to cough them up.
"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.
"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."
I forgot to post this link.
During my whole life Democrats have scored political points against Republican presidents by saying "if only we talked to our enemies, then all problems would be solved". Even worse, the (apparent) lack of communication led Republicans like Specter and far left Democrats like Pelosi to try to do the negotiations themselves, or pretend like it.
I reluctantly conclude that it would be better for Republican presidents to take charge of the situation by ordering the State Department to conduct fruitless talks with our enemies on a regular basis. Maybe the president should just order that we communicate with every country on earth once every six months, so there is no jousting back and forth about whether the other country forced us to talk.
The State Department gets paid to do things like this, just going through the motions and making sure that no one thinks we are negotiating. It would be worth it to keep Pelosi at home, and never see her in a head scarf again.
haystack's 12th:
Conservatives (and Presidential Candidates especially) shall offer no aid and comfort to the opposition in times of legislative conflict (and ensuing political campaigns).