What's Wrong With You?

I'm still not sure about what torqued me off so much about Bill Kristol's latest bundle of propaganda in The Weekly Standard.

But I sent him back the following response:

"What's wrong with you?

"First -- It's a lie when you say that the troops stand with the President. The troops stand where they are commanded to stand. They have no position on the politics surrounding the war that Senators (or the President for that matter) are obliged to respect. The President and the Senate are having a conversation on the command structure. The soldiers will stand with whoever prevails in that conversation.

"Second, the Senators work for the voters who elect them. If they are now scurrying around like frantic little mice, and changing their positions because their employers are angry -- they are not, as you imply, showing any character defects. They are doing their jobs.

"Third -- It doesn't matter what the Republicans do on this vote, anyway. This vote is solely about the Democrats and what they will do. The President announced this surge solely to get the Democrats to share the blame for this mess with him.

"As you have pointed out almost non-stop since the middle of 2003, when the Republicans were still in control of the Senate, the President took no action to fight this war in any real sense of the word. The question you might want to ask yourself is why didn't the President bother to fight this war when he had control of all three branches of the government?

"Fourth -- You know this, because you admit it by omission. If this surge fails, and since it is not even a half-measure, it likely will fail, the President and the Vice President will have no choice except to ask for another surge. And another one. And your position will be increasingly lonely. Because all your friends, the folks at the New York Post, the folks at the Corner, Senator Lieberman, Secretary Gates, General Petraeus, all your friends, keep referring to this surge as "one last chance". They keep talking about requiring the Iraqi government to work with us. They keep saying that our stay in Iraq is not forever.

"Better stop flogging your natural allies. Better stop treating the 50% of the voters who are Democrats as if they belong to another, unpatriotic nation. Better start laying the groundwork for the fact that United States actions in this region should not be dependent upon the actions of any Iraqi government; better start laying the groundwork for the 20, 30, 40, 80 more years of "one last chances" that American Presidents (or whatever Dick Cheney thinks of himself as) are going to need to make this right.


B
Forest Hills New York

Law School '82

Democratic Voter

War Supporter (until now?)

Inveterate Bush Basher

Lover of the United States Constitution and its system of Checks and Balances