A WaPo Wedge Issue, Or Where Did I Leave My Brain
QAs many readers know, we are not fond of the Washington Post, and for good reason. Not only is it not very informative (at times, it does have it's moments) but the editorial staff is just plain insane. I saw this yesterday, but due to technical problems with Blogger.com, I could not fully address it. Now I can. The piece is written by Harold Meyerson.
Old lies die hard. We grow inured to the administration's howlers in defense of its Iraq policy, so much so that the preposterous case the president made in his State of the Union address for our continued presence in Iraq went almost unnoticed. But he actually said this:
"A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, [and] would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country. . . ."
Is there one person anywhere inside the administration who really believes that Abu Musab Zarqawi's murderous band of outsiders would emerge as rulers over the vastly larger and very well-armed Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish legions if we pulled out? The same band of outsiders that tried to stop the Sunnis from voting in December's parliamentary election and held their turnout down, in some provinces, to a mere 90 percent?
A brief history lesson for Mr. Meyerson: Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, he controlled those same areas, and those same demographics--Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites--all through the same tool that al-Zarqawi and bin Laden would use. It is called fear. It is called terror. JUST NOW Iraqis are tasting their first bit of freedom in over forty years. And I would like to remind him that when it came to the Sunnis and voting, they did not participate in the elections held last january, or those in mid-November about the constitution because they were hoping the government would fail. After seeing that they failed in producing that, they went to the polls in droves. Oh, and one more thing ... There was little violence involved in this last election. We ought to know. We were posting the live-blog updates from Iraq. Mr. Meyerson needs to do some fact checking before speaking next time.
We've heard this one before. Before the war, the president told us that Saddam Hussein was an ally and co-conspirator of Osama bin Laden -- all evidence to the contrary. Now bin Laden is poised to take over the country if we leave -- all evidence to the contrary.
This is the part that I relish. The part where I slam the door on idiots like Mr. Meyerson. Rather than tear him apart, and waste valuable space here, I will let my other half do it, as he did last month when he put up the information regarding Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. This is not opinion. What Thomas wrote was fact, backed up by documents and research. Indeed, Saddam did have ties to terrorists, and he did have ties to al Qaeda.
I don't agree with it, but there is a serious case to be made for our continuing presence in Iraq as a buffer and negotiator between the Shiite and Sunni populations. But George W. Bush said absolutely nothing on Tuesday night about the real tensions that threaten to pull Iraq apart and our role in trying to suppress them. Nearly three years after he took us to war, the president's justification for our intervention is nonsensical by every measure save one: the political. The only issue on which even 50 percent of Americans say Bush is doing a good job is fighting terrorism, so the war in Iraq must be conflated with the war on bin Laden.
I am left to wonder if Mr. Meyerson has ever read the transcripts availabel for either of the two Constitutional Conventions, or is he knows the Hell that our Founding Fathers went through to form a new government? We knew that pulling that nation together was not going to be easy, but they were united in one common cause: freedom. That has gotten them this far. Our continued assistance in helping produce a stable democratic government will move along undaunted. But make no mistake. We did not go into Iraq for it's oil, or for political purposes. We went into Iraq for two glaring reasons. First, Saddam had flaunted UN resolutions for twelve years--seventeen resolutions, to be exact. He refused to disarm, or come clean about his WMD programs. Second, we knew of his ties to terrorists around the region--including al Qaeda--and it was decided that is he was working with them, then he was harboring them as well. We went in and disarmed, and removed, a dictator.
By the measure of his past speeches, however, it was a perfunctory case that the president made for the war on Tuesday; indeed, we have to go back in time to BC (Before Clinton) to find a State of the Union as spiritless and themeless as this one. As conservatives promptly noted, what was missing from the text was the laissez-faire zeal that had previously suffused Bush domestic policy. Bush didn't even make much of a case for his health savings accounts, to which he devoted just a single sentence. Time was when he would have said that Americans should handle their own accounts. But Bush said that last year when he sought to privatize Social Security, and his countrymen recoiled.
No, the nation did not recoil. The president toured the US holding town hall meetings and discussing the issue. He proposed a plan to Congress, which was met with serious hysterical histrionics from the Demopcrats. Indeed, it was the Democrats who stood and applauded their shameful conduct during the State of the Union speech. Never before have I witnessed a party so opposed to making America better and solving her problems. It makes me desire term limits for some of these schmucks in Congress, starting with their reelection bids this year.
Indeed, the only case for which Bush summoned his signature cockiness was his argument for warrantless surveillance. "If there are people inside our country who are talkin' with al Qaeda," he said (and the telltale dropped "g" shows that Bush means business), "we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again." This is, as Karl Rove made clear the week before, the one issue on which the president intends to hit the Democrats again and again. For a president given to attack lines, it was really the only attack line in his entire speech -- a point surely not lost on the increasingly anxious Republican lawmakers in the room.
And, as the WaPo is about to find out (as soon as I am done, Thomas has a new story from today that he is going to pound the Post on), the simple fact of the matter is this NSA program is well within the law, and has provided us with a level of security at home that was not here prior to 9/11.
For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?
I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
Notice how Mr. Meyerson refuses to call them what they are, which is illegal aliens. I am sure they have little problems with the issue back in Washington, but in Arizona, where Thomas and I both live, we are drowning in them out here, and we have a state that is more apt to pay the issue lip service than actually do anything about it. The governor is talking tough, but voters will not forget how her office fought Prop. 200, which forbade the state from giving any sort of welfare. This problem will not simply go away, and right now it is a daunting task to call for the round-up of all of them. It would be much simpler if we wntr back to the program that Thomas proposed a long time ago. However, he is not one to revisit a dead subject. Obviously, no one cares, except the token columnist that is grasping at straws because his party has nothing to run on in 2006, or 2008.
This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.
That was California. In Arizona, a similar measure called Prop. 200 not only had over 70% support, but the largest demographic voting in favor of it were the legal Mexicans and Latinos that had gone through the process, and were sick of seeing their brethren do it illegally, and obtain far more for doing so. I personally know of three families that spent years trying to emigrate to the United States. Piece by piece these families arrived here legally, and one-by-one, these people took the oath of citizenship. These people were appalled to see what the illegal alien gets when they come to the United States. They did vote in favor of Prop. 200, and their reasoning is best summed up by the father of the first family to arrive here in the States.
"I worked hard to bring my family here. I wanted to move to the United States. In El Salvador there is nothing. Here, the opportunities are endless if you work hard and smart. I am unhappy to see a proud nation turn it's back on it's laws; those same laws that told me I had to work hard to get to America. Now, America is turning it's back on the hard work legal immigrants went through to get here."
Warrantless wiretapping and immigrant bashing as the Republican wedge issues of '06? Well, what else can they run on?
Their competence? Their ethics?
We have a lkot to run on, but people like Mr. Meyerson refuse to acknowledge them. GDP is up, and has been going up--steadily--for years. Unemployment is at it's lowest since the president took office in 2000, and is lower than at any time during President Clinton's two terms--now at 4.7%. The president wants the tax-cuts made permanent because those cuts helped drag us out of a recession that was caused by the economic mismanagement of the Clinton years. We are winning the GWOT as we kill or capture al Qaeda members across the globe. We have freed close to fifty million people from the oppressive regimes they once lived under, and democracy is spreading across a region that once had only one democracy in Israel. We are dealing with regimes like North Korea and Iran who want to obtain nuclear weapons not for "peaceful" deterence, but for blackmail purposes and destructive ends.
The GOP has much it can campaign on in 2006 and in 2008. And 2008 will deliver the worst nightmare to Democrat's doorstep; they have no one who can compete against our candidates for the White House. Who do the Democrats have for '08? Hillary? Kerry? Gore? Biden? Warner? Richardson? Throw in Kucinich, Sharpton, and Bayh, and what they have is a team of losers. Warner and Richardson are their only hopes. Meanwhile the GOP has a host of candidates in Gingrich (possibly), Guiliani (another possibility), McCain (he will not win the nomination), and Frist. Those are the low guys on the totem pole. We also have the possibility of Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and George Allen (who is our personal favorite in the mix). We have more to offer than obstructionism, and "we hate Bush" mantras. We have ideas, and thus far, we have shown we have the better ideas. That is why Kerry lost in 2004, and why the Democrats continue to lose at the ballot box. They are, literally, the party with no fresh ideas, but just tired old retreads.
The Bunny ;)
QAs many readers know, we are not fond of the Washington Post, and for good reason. Not only is it not very informative (at times, it does have it's moments) but the editorial staff is just plain insane. I saw this yesterday, but due to technical problems with Blogger.com, I could not fully address it. Now I can. The piece is written by Harold Meyerson.
Old lies die hard. We grow inured to the administration's howlers in defense of its Iraq policy, so much so that the preposterous case the president made in his State of the Union address for our continued presence in Iraq went almost unnoticed. But he actually said this:
"A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, [and] would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country. . . ."
Is there one person anywhere inside the administration who really believes that Abu Musab Zarqawi's murderous band of outsiders would emerge as rulers over the vastly larger and very well-armed Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish legions if we pulled out? The same band of outsiders that tried to stop the Sunnis from voting in December's parliamentary election and held their turnout down, in some provinces, to a mere 90 percent?
A brief history lesson for Mr. Meyerson: Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, he controlled those same areas, and those same demographics--Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites--all through the same tool that al-Zarqawi and bin Laden would use. It is called fear. It is called terror. JUST NOW Iraqis are tasting their first bit of freedom in over forty years. And I would like to remind him that when it came to the Sunnis and voting, they did not participate in the elections held last january, or those in mid-November about the constitution because they were hoping the government would fail. After seeing that they failed in producing that, they went to the polls in droves. Oh, and one more thing ... There was little violence involved in this last election. We ought to know. We were posting the live-blog updates from Iraq. Mr. Meyerson needs to do some fact checking before speaking next time.
We've heard this one before. Before the war, the president told us that Saddam Hussein was an ally and co-conspirator of Osama bin Laden -- all evidence to the contrary. Now bin Laden is poised to take over the country if we leave -- all evidence to the contrary.
This is the part that I relish. The part where I slam the door on idiots like Mr. Meyerson. Rather than tear him apart, and waste valuable space here, I will let my other half do it, as he did last month when he put up the information regarding Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. This is not opinion. What Thomas wrote was fact, backed up by documents and research. Indeed, Saddam did have ties to terrorists, and he did have ties to al Qaeda.
I don't agree with it, but there is a serious case to be made for our continuing presence in Iraq as a buffer and negotiator between the Shiite and Sunni populations. But George W. Bush said absolutely nothing on Tuesday night about the real tensions that threaten to pull Iraq apart and our role in trying to suppress them. Nearly three years after he took us to war, the president's justification for our intervention is nonsensical by every measure save one: the political. The only issue on which even 50 percent of Americans say Bush is doing a good job is fighting terrorism, so the war in Iraq must be conflated with the war on bin Laden.
I am left to wonder if Mr. Meyerson has ever read the transcripts availabel for either of the two Constitutional Conventions, or is he knows the Hell that our Founding Fathers went through to form a new government? We knew that pulling that nation together was not going to be easy, but they were united in one common cause: freedom. That has gotten them this far. Our continued assistance in helping produce a stable democratic government will move along undaunted. But make no mistake. We did not go into Iraq for it's oil, or for political purposes. We went into Iraq for two glaring reasons. First, Saddam had flaunted UN resolutions for twelve years--seventeen resolutions, to be exact. He refused to disarm, or come clean about his WMD programs. Second, we knew of his ties to terrorists around the region--including al Qaeda--and it was decided that is he was working with them, then he was harboring them as well. We went in and disarmed, and removed, a dictator.
By the measure of his past speeches, however, it was a perfunctory case that the president made for the war on Tuesday; indeed, we have to go back in time to BC (Before Clinton) to find a State of the Union as spiritless and themeless as this one. As conservatives promptly noted, what was missing from the text was the laissez-faire zeal that had previously suffused Bush domestic policy. Bush didn't even make much of a case for his health savings accounts, to which he devoted just a single sentence. Time was when he would have said that Americans should handle their own accounts. But Bush said that last year when he sought to privatize Social Security, and his countrymen recoiled.
No, the nation did not recoil. The president toured the US holding town hall meetings and discussing the issue. He proposed a plan to Congress, which was met with serious hysterical histrionics from the Demopcrats. Indeed, it was the Democrats who stood and applauded their shameful conduct during the State of the Union speech. Never before have I witnessed a party so opposed to making America better and solving her problems. It makes me desire term limits for some of these schmucks in Congress, starting with their reelection bids this year.
Indeed, the only case for which Bush summoned his signature cockiness was his argument for warrantless surveillance. "If there are people inside our country who are talkin' with al Qaeda," he said (and the telltale dropped "g" shows that Bush means business), "we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again." This is, as Karl Rove made clear the week before, the one issue on which the president intends to hit the Democrats again and again. For a president given to attack lines, it was really the only attack line in his entire speech -- a point surely not lost on the increasingly anxious Republican lawmakers in the room.
And, as the WaPo is about to find out (as soon as I am done, Thomas has a new story from today that he is going to pound the Post on), the simple fact of the matter is this NSA program is well within the law, and has provided us with a level of security at home that was not here prior to 9/11.
For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?
I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States.
Notice how Mr. Meyerson refuses to call them what they are, which is illegal aliens. I am sure they have little problems with the issue back in Washington, but in Arizona, where Thomas and I both live, we are drowning in them out here, and we have a state that is more apt to pay the issue lip service than actually do anything about it. The governor is talking tough, but voters will not forget how her office fought Prop. 200, which forbade the state from giving any sort of welfare. This problem will not simply go away, and right now it is a daunting task to call for the round-up of all of them. It would be much simpler if we wntr back to the program that Thomas proposed a long time ago. However, he is not one to revisit a dead subject. Obviously, no one cares, except the token columnist that is grasping at straws because his party has nothing to run on in 2006, or 2008.
This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.
That was California. In Arizona, a similar measure called Prop. 200 not only had over 70% support, but the largest demographic voting in favor of it were the legal Mexicans and Latinos that had gone through the process, and were sick of seeing their brethren do it illegally, and obtain far more for doing so. I personally know of three families that spent years trying to emigrate to the United States. Piece by piece these families arrived here legally, and one-by-one, these people took the oath of citizenship. These people were appalled to see what the illegal alien gets when they come to the United States. They did vote in favor of Prop. 200, and their reasoning is best summed up by the father of the first family to arrive here in the States.
"I worked hard to bring my family here. I wanted to move to the United States. In El Salvador there is nothing. Here, the opportunities are endless if you work hard and smart. I am unhappy to see a proud nation turn it's back on it's laws; those same laws that told me I had to work hard to get to America. Now, America is turning it's back on the hard work legal immigrants went through to get here."
Warrantless wiretapping and immigrant bashing as the Republican wedge issues of '06? Well, what else can they run on?
Their competence? Their ethics?
We have a lkot to run on, but people like Mr. Meyerson refuse to acknowledge them. GDP is up, and has been going up--steadily--for years. Unemployment is at it's lowest since the president took office in 2000, and is lower than at any time during President Clinton's two terms--now at 4.7%. The president wants the tax-cuts made permanent because those cuts helped drag us out of a recession that was caused by the economic mismanagement of the Clinton years. We are winning the GWOT as we kill or capture al Qaeda members across the globe. We have freed close to fifty million people from the oppressive regimes they once lived under, and democracy is spreading across a region that once had only one democracy in Israel. We are dealing with regimes like North Korea and Iran who want to obtain nuclear weapons not for "peaceful" deterence, but for blackmail purposes and destructive ends.
The GOP has much it can campaign on in 2006 and in 2008. And 2008 will deliver the worst nightmare to Democrat's doorstep; they have no one who can compete against our candidates for the White House. Who do the Democrats have for '08? Hillary? Kerry? Gore? Biden? Warner? Richardson? Throw in Kucinich, Sharpton, and Bayh, and what they have is a team of losers. Warner and Richardson are their only hopes. Meanwhile the GOP has a host of candidates in Gingrich (possibly), Guiliani (another possibility), McCain (he will not win the nomination), and Frist. Those are the low guys on the totem pole. We also have the possibility of Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and George Allen (who is our personal favorite in the mix). We have more to offer than obstructionism, and "we hate Bush" mantras. We have ideas, and thus far, we have shown we have the better ideas. That is why Kerry lost in 2004, and why the Democrats continue to lose at the ballot box. They are, literally, the party with no fresh ideas, but just tired old retreads.
The Bunny ;)
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 11:53 AM
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