These Three Aren't Mavericks: The Party Traitors of the GOP
Picked this up out of the New York Times this morning. It seems the "mavericks" are on the loose again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/politics/21trio.html?ei=5094&en=b5f2caf6bd98a9ae&hp=&ex=1132635600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - On a July evening in the Capitol, Vice President Dick Cheney summoned three Republican senators to his ornate office just off the Senate chamber. The Republicans - John W. Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - were making trouble for the Bush administration, and Mr. Cheney let them know it.
The three were pushing for regulations on the treatment of American military prisoners, including a contentious ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." The vice president wanted the provision pulled from a huge military spending bill. The senators would not budge.
"We agreed to disagree," Mr. Graham said in an interview last week.
That private session was an early hint of a Republican feud that spilled into the open last week, as Senate Republicans openly challenged President Bush on American military policy in Iraq and the war on terrorism. In the center of the fray, pushing Congress to reassert itself, were those same three Republicans.
Though their views on the war differ, they have much in common: each is a member of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, each has a strong maverick streak and each has personal ties to the military - and to one another, mostly through Mr. McCain.
First off, I don't like these three gentlemen. I don't like them for a number of reasons, and most of them revolving around the fact that they have stabbed their party in the back so many times that it's tough to tell the difference between them and a liberal. Take the Gang of 14 deal of which all three are a part of. With that deal they underminded the president and his authority to nominate qualified people to the federal bench. With that deal, they denied several nominees their up-or-down vote in the Seante, and even their completion of their committee hearings. This was McCain's baby, and it seem that the base is reacting very negatively in regard to this issue.
Another issue, of course, is the Warner Amendment which calls for greater scrutiny on the Senate's side and more forthrightness from the White House. I have a problem with what is being asked of the White House in the measure. The Senate already has a problem with keeping it's yaps shut at a time of war. They love to flap their mouths to the talking head shows on Sunday mornings because it makes them feel important or special. Ask Rockefeller how special he feels after revealing on cable television that he informed an enemy nation when we were going to attack Iraq. He is still taking a beating over that little slip.
Their relationships with Mr. Bush are respectful, though not especially close, and each has a different political agenda. Mr. Warner, 78, aspires mostly to maintain his status as an elder statesman in the Senate. Mr. McCain, 69, covets the White House. And Mr. Graham, 50, is still a rising star.
But their "little triumvirate," as Mr. Graham calls it, has become a powerful political force at a time when President Bush's popularity is sinking and all of Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in Iraq.
On that score, the three are not in lockstep. Last week, Mr. Warner prodded the Senate to require the Bush administration to provide Congress with quarterly progress reports on the war, spawning a raucous House debate over whether troops should withdraw and setting the stage for Iraq to dominate the 2006 midterm elections. But Senators McCain and Graham, who have steadfastly called for more troops, not fewer, voted against Mr. Warner's plan, saying it smacked of a timetable for withdrawal.
Yet the three are firm in their conviction that Congress, having ceded authority on military matters to the executive branch, must flex its muscles. In addition to sticking together on the so-called torture ban - despite a White House veto threat - they joined last week in backing a bipartisan compromise, sponsored by Senator Graham, giving "enemy combatants" in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, limited rights of appeal in federal court.
The "triumvirate of retards" continues it's parade around Capitol Hill. This is exactly the reason why I don't want any of these monkeys running for a higher office. If they don't like a law on the books, they act like Democrats, and break them. ENEMY COMBATANTS HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. They're foreign fighters, not citizens, and they deserve no protections or rights granted under the Constitution. For that matter, the Geneva Convention doesn't even recognize them as combatants with protections. The torture ban I'm neither here nor there on. I don't know why these three idiots are even worried about this. None of the countries that these detainees are from are even signatories to the Geneva Convention. It's time to get a little rougher with the animals that like beheading their prisoners.
"This was a huge 'Congress getting into the ballgame' week," Mr. Graham said. Mr. Warner said wryly, "You know, Congress is a co-equal branch."
But Congress is hardly united, and now the three senators must contend with House Republicans. On Thursday, Mr. Warner met with his House counterpart, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, to discuss the military spending bill, which lacks the torture provision in the House version.
Mr. Hunter said afterward that each man promised to give the other "a fair hearing." But Mr. Warner said he made his position clear.
"I told him as an opening salvo, 'I'm solid with John McCain,' " Mr. Warner said.
So, Warner can back good ol' Johnny, but he can't back the commander-in-chief? I think this is one of the reasons the GOP is having serious trouble with it's fundraising efforts. The base only sees these monkeys in the forefront, and they're giving the president a helluva time lately. People aren't going to donate to the main party groups--the RNC and the NRSC--because they know the money will be dispersed throughout the party. That means the money will be supporting a candidate that they dislike. This is the reason why we, at the Asylum, jumped on Capt. Ed Morrissey's boat. Not one more dime goes to either group until they get the hint. It's time for a change. America--and the GOP base in general--is sick of the same old status quo from DC.
All three senators are also in the "Gang of 14," a bipartisan group that struck a deal on President Bush's judicial nominees. They trace their alliance on military matters to last year's revelations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The scandal prompted Senator Warner, the committee chairman, to conduct hearings, over the objections of some Republicans who said he was handing a political issue to Democrats.
Mr. Graham says he became convinced at that time that Congress needed "a holistic approach" to the delicate issues surrounding those in American government custody. So he asked the committee chairman for permission to hold hearings on the legal rights of detainees. He recounts Mr. Warner's reply:
"He said: 'Go to it, young man.' "
Mr. McCain says he pressed for the torture provision because "frankly, we never got answers to some of the questions that were asked" about Abu Ghraib. The measure would require all American troops to use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army manual; the White House is now pressing to make clandestine Central Intelligence Agency activities exempt. Mr. McCain said last week that he was "hopeful, but not confident" the negotiations could produce a compromise.
Caveat: The Gang of 14 deal had absolutely NOTHING to do with Abu Ghraib. By placing that in the same sentence as Abu Ghraib, the more uneducated might get the wrong idea about what the Gang of 14 really was about. It had nothing to do with detainees, unless one counts the judges being held up in committee as detainees. I'd rate their treatment thus far as "cruel and unusual," but of course I'm not being listened to. These three are marching to the beat of their own drums.
What needed to be investigated at Abu Ghraib was how the media got their hands on the photos and the stories. The Army was already conducting an investigation into Abu Ghraib. The November prior to the story breaking, Secretary Rumsfeld informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that they were investigating allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The news media "broke" the story in January of the following year. McCain claims that the sort of treatment at Abu Ghraib was "demeaning," "embarrassing," and "wholly uncalled for." Well, I tend to disagree with McCain on this one. These are animals, fighting in the service of our enemy. They show no mercy, give little regard for human life, bomb innocent civilians, behead their prisoners, and generally act like the dictator we deposed. And he wants us to "be nice to them." I'm sorry, no. Whereas I don't condone torture, per se, I do condone methods that will get information out of these people without causing serious injury to them; and yes, that includes chemical interrogation.
"I think I can help the administration by forcing this through," he said. "I think I can help them more effectively pursue the war on terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular."
This should show everyone where McCain's loyalties lie. He thinks that the White House "needs" his help, and notice how he says he can "help" them by "forcing this through"? It is the White House's job to prosecute this war, not Congress'. By toning down what we can and can't use in methods of interrogation on these people is not going to help us in this war, especially the "Iraq Phase" of this war. It's going to hinder us.
Not everyone in the Capitol is so convinced, and Mr. Graham says the three have "withstood a lot of pressure." The McCain provision received only nine "no" votes in the Senate, but four were from Republicans on the Armed Services Committee - a tally that suggests a possible rift within the panel. One of the four, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, complained last week that his colleagues had given Democrats an opening to politicize the Iraq war.
"I think McCain galvanized opinion on this issue because of who he is and what he's been through," Mr. Cornyn said, "in a way that probably no one else could."
For Democrats, who have spent months trying to put the public spotlight on the issues of detainee treatment and the war in Iraq, the three Republicans are like some kind of gift from the political gods. After the Senate overwhelmingly adopted Mr. Warner's measure on the war, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, stood slack-jawed.
"It's gigantic," Mr. Biden said.
Perhaps that is because Mr. Warner, who characterizes his own military service as "very modest," has such strong defense bona fides: He has been associated with the armed services, in one form or another, for 60 years. But Mr. Biden said military ties are not the main reason Senators Warner, McCain and Graham have such strong credibility.
"I think their credibility," Mr. Biden said, "is mainly, they're Republicans."
And of course Biden's happy because what these idiots are doing is hurting the president and his ability to fulfill his duties in office. The Democrats have been trying for five years to tear this president down, and now they have welcome and willing "friends" across the aisle that will help them do it. There's no doubt that McCain wants the White House, and isn't it ironic that Graham and Warner are both up for reelection in 2008, as well? Could they be working with him on that run, like Graham did in 2000? Possibly, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were.
This "puff-piece" by the Times is exactly why I dislike RINOs. Too much emphasis is being placed on the moderates in the party. The moderates were not what garnered Reagan's record breaking electoral landslides. It was the conservative movement as a whole that did that. And I think it's time we get back to that. This nation showed then that it was solidly conservative in it's values and morals, it's traditions and culture. We need to return to that, but first we need to throw these weak-kneed, spineless, opportunistic RINOs overboard. It's time to reclaim the party from these people who sound like conservatives when they're up for reelection, yet act like liberals when they get back to DC. Wake up, America. Don't fall for idiots like these three. If you do, you're going to end up taking us down a road the liberals would like, and it'll take less time because of their party affiliations.
Publius II
Picked this up out of the New York Times this morning. It seems the "mavericks" are on the loose again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/politics/21trio.html?ei=5094&en=b5f2caf6bd98a9ae&hp=&ex=1132635600&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Nov. 20 - On a July evening in the Capitol, Vice President Dick Cheney summoned three Republican senators to his ornate office just off the Senate chamber. The Republicans - John W. Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina - were making trouble for the Bush administration, and Mr. Cheney let them know it.
The three were pushing for regulations on the treatment of American military prisoners, including a contentious ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." The vice president wanted the provision pulled from a huge military spending bill. The senators would not budge.
"We agreed to disagree," Mr. Graham said in an interview last week.
That private session was an early hint of a Republican feud that spilled into the open last week, as Senate Republicans openly challenged President Bush on American military policy in Iraq and the war on terrorism. In the center of the fray, pushing Congress to reassert itself, were those same three Republicans.
Though their views on the war differ, they have much in common: each is a member of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, each has a strong maverick streak and each has personal ties to the military - and to one another, mostly through Mr. McCain.
First off, I don't like these three gentlemen. I don't like them for a number of reasons, and most of them revolving around the fact that they have stabbed their party in the back so many times that it's tough to tell the difference between them and a liberal. Take the Gang of 14 deal of which all three are a part of. With that deal they underminded the president and his authority to nominate qualified people to the federal bench. With that deal, they denied several nominees their up-or-down vote in the Seante, and even their completion of their committee hearings. This was McCain's baby, and it seem that the base is reacting very negatively in regard to this issue.
Another issue, of course, is the Warner Amendment which calls for greater scrutiny on the Senate's side and more forthrightness from the White House. I have a problem with what is being asked of the White House in the measure. The Senate already has a problem with keeping it's yaps shut at a time of war. They love to flap their mouths to the talking head shows on Sunday mornings because it makes them feel important or special. Ask Rockefeller how special he feels after revealing on cable television that he informed an enemy nation when we were going to attack Iraq. He is still taking a beating over that little slip.
Their relationships with Mr. Bush are respectful, though not especially close, and each has a different political agenda. Mr. Warner, 78, aspires mostly to maintain his status as an elder statesman in the Senate. Mr. McCain, 69, covets the White House. And Mr. Graham, 50, is still a rising star.
But their "little triumvirate," as Mr. Graham calls it, has become a powerful political force at a time when President Bush's popularity is sinking and all of Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in Iraq.
On that score, the three are not in lockstep. Last week, Mr. Warner prodded the Senate to require the Bush administration to provide Congress with quarterly progress reports on the war, spawning a raucous House debate over whether troops should withdraw and setting the stage for Iraq to dominate the 2006 midterm elections. But Senators McCain and Graham, who have steadfastly called for more troops, not fewer, voted against Mr. Warner's plan, saying it smacked of a timetable for withdrawal.
Yet the three are firm in their conviction that Congress, having ceded authority on military matters to the executive branch, must flex its muscles. In addition to sticking together on the so-called torture ban - despite a White House veto threat - they joined last week in backing a bipartisan compromise, sponsored by Senator Graham, giving "enemy combatants" in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, limited rights of appeal in federal court.
The "triumvirate of retards" continues it's parade around Capitol Hill. This is exactly the reason why I don't want any of these monkeys running for a higher office. If they don't like a law on the books, they act like Democrats, and break them. ENEMY COMBATANTS HAVE NO RIGHTS UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. They're foreign fighters, not citizens, and they deserve no protections or rights granted under the Constitution. For that matter, the Geneva Convention doesn't even recognize them as combatants with protections. The torture ban I'm neither here nor there on. I don't know why these three idiots are even worried about this. None of the countries that these detainees are from are even signatories to the Geneva Convention. It's time to get a little rougher with the animals that like beheading their prisoners.
"This was a huge 'Congress getting into the ballgame' week," Mr. Graham said. Mr. Warner said wryly, "You know, Congress is a co-equal branch."
But Congress is hardly united, and now the three senators must contend with House Republicans. On Thursday, Mr. Warner met with his House counterpart, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, to discuss the military spending bill, which lacks the torture provision in the House version.
Mr. Hunter said afterward that each man promised to give the other "a fair hearing." But Mr. Warner said he made his position clear.
"I told him as an opening salvo, 'I'm solid with John McCain,' " Mr. Warner said.
So, Warner can back good ol' Johnny, but he can't back the commander-in-chief? I think this is one of the reasons the GOP is having serious trouble with it's fundraising efforts. The base only sees these monkeys in the forefront, and they're giving the president a helluva time lately. People aren't going to donate to the main party groups--the RNC and the NRSC--because they know the money will be dispersed throughout the party. That means the money will be supporting a candidate that they dislike. This is the reason why we, at the Asylum, jumped on Capt. Ed Morrissey's boat. Not one more dime goes to either group until they get the hint. It's time for a change. America--and the GOP base in general--is sick of the same old status quo from DC.
All three senators are also in the "Gang of 14," a bipartisan group that struck a deal on President Bush's judicial nominees. They trace their alliance on military matters to last year's revelations of detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The scandal prompted Senator Warner, the committee chairman, to conduct hearings, over the objections of some Republicans who said he was handing a political issue to Democrats.
Mr. Graham says he became convinced at that time that Congress needed "a holistic approach" to the delicate issues surrounding those in American government custody. So he asked the committee chairman for permission to hold hearings on the legal rights of detainees. He recounts Mr. Warner's reply:
"He said: 'Go to it, young man.' "
Mr. McCain says he pressed for the torture provision because "frankly, we never got answers to some of the questions that were asked" about Abu Ghraib. The measure would require all American troops to use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army manual; the White House is now pressing to make clandestine Central Intelligence Agency activities exempt. Mr. McCain said last week that he was "hopeful, but not confident" the negotiations could produce a compromise.
Caveat: The Gang of 14 deal had absolutely NOTHING to do with Abu Ghraib. By placing that in the same sentence as Abu Ghraib, the more uneducated might get the wrong idea about what the Gang of 14 really was about. It had nothing to do with detainees, unless one counts the judges being held up in committee as detainees. I'd rate their treatment thus far as "cruel and unusual," but of course I'm not being listened to. These three are marching to the beat of their own drums.
What needed to be investigated at Abu Ghraib was how the media got their hands on the photos and the stories. The Army was already conducting an investigation into Abu Ghraib. The November prior to the story breaking, Secretary Rumsfeld informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that they were investigating allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The news media "broke" the story in January of the following year. McCain claims that the sort of treatment at Abu Ghraib was "demeaning," "embarrassing," and "wholly uncalled for." Well, I tend to disagree with McCain on this one. These are animals, fighting in the service of our enemy. They show no mercy, give little regard for human life, bomb innocent civilians, behead their prisoners, and generally act like the dictator we deposed. And he wants us to "be nice to them." I'm sorry, no. Whereas I don't condone torture, per se, I do condone methods that will get information out of these people without causing serious injury to them; and yes, that includes chemical interrogation.
"I think I can help the administration by forcing this through," he said. "I think I can help them more effectively pursue the war on terror in general and the war in Iraq in particular."
This should show everyone where McCain's loyalties lie. He thinks that the White House "needs" his help, and notice how he says he can "help" them by "forcing this through"? It is the White House's job to prosecute this war, not Congress'. By toning down what we can and can't use in methods of interrogation on these people is not going to help us in this war, especially the "Iraq Phase" of this war. It's going to hinder us.
Not everyone in the Capitol is so convinced, and Mr. Graham says the three have "withstood a lot of pressure." The McCain provision received only nine "no" votes in the Senate, but four were from Republicans on the Armed Services Committee - a tally that suggests a possible rift within the panel. One of the four, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, complained last week that his colleagues had given Democrats an opening to politicize the Iraq war.
"I think McCain galvanized opinion on this issue because of who he is and what he's been through," Mr. Cornyn said, "in a way that probably no one else could."
For Democrats, who have spent months trying to put the public spotlight on the issues of detainee treatment and the war in Iraq, the three Republicans are like some kind of gift from the political gods. After the Senate overwhelmingly adopted Mr. Warner's measure on the war, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, stood slack-jawed.
"It's gigantic," Mr. Biden said.
Perhaps that is because Mr. Warner, who characterizes his own military service as "very modest," has such strong defense bona fides: He has been associated with the armed services, in one form or another, for 60 years. But Mr. Biden said military ties are not the main reason Senators Warner, McCain and Graham have such strong credibility.
"I think their credibility," Mr. Biden said, "is mainly, they're Republicans."
And of course Biden's happy because what these idiots are doing is hurting the president and his ability to fulfill his duties in office. The Democrats have been trying for five years to tear this president down, and now they have welcome and willing "friends" across the aisle that will help them do it. There's no doubt that McCain wants the White House, and isn't it ironic that Graham and Warner are both up for reelection in 2008, as well? Could they be working with him on that run, like Graham did in 2000? Possibly, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were.
This "puff-piece" by the Times is exactly why I dislike RINOs. Too much emphasis is being placed on the moderates in the party. The moderates were not what garnered Reagan's record breaking electoral landslides. It was the conservative movement as a whole that did that. And I think it's time we get back to that. This nation showed then that it was solidly conservative in it's values and morals, it's traditions and culture. We need to return to that, but first we need to throw these weak-kneed, spineless, opportunistic RINOs overboard. It's time to reclaim the party from these people who sound like conservatives when they're up for reelection, yet act like liberals when they get back to DC. Wake up, America. Don't fall for idiots like these three. If you do, you're going to end up taking us down a road the liberals would like, and it'll take less time because of their party affiliations.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 10:58 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home