Republicans aren’t willing to do what ‘to the military’?

July 18, 2007

We’ve heard quite a lot of stupidity about Iraq lately, but this is a jaw-dropper.

On the July 18 edition of MSNBC Live, during a discussion of Senate Republicans’ move blocking an up or down vote on a Democratic amendment aimed at withdrawing troops from Iraq, Washington Post staff writer Shailagh Murray asserted that “most Republicans” could not “get their heads around” what she described as the amendment’s “hard and fast withdrawal date” and therefore would not support the measure because “[t]hey’re just not willing to do that to the military.”

Murray did not explain what exactly the amendment would “do” to the military, nor did she explain how it represented a “hard and fast withdrawal date.”

Keep in mind, Murray is not a Republican operative going on MSNBC with talking points from the RNC and Karl Rove, she’s ostensibly an objective reporter covering Congress from one of the nation’s most important dailies.

And for reasons that she didn’t (or couldn’t) explain, she thinks a new policy that gets the troops out of the middle of a civil war is somehow bad for those in uniform.

Seriously, what kind of bizarro world is this?

I wouldn’t presume to speak for the troops, but their opinions are not exactly a mystery.

Nearly 60 percent of readers who participated in a recent Military.com poll said the United States should withdraw its troops from Iraq now or by the end of 2008. More than 40 percent of the respondents agreed the pullout should begin immediately because “we’re wasting lives and resources there.”

Moreover, the Military Times newspapers questioned 6,000 randomly selected active-duty members last December, long before conditions deteriorated to where they are now, and found widespread disapproval of the president’s policy.

Barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the new poll for the four papers (Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Times). In another startling finding, only 41% now feel it was the right idea to go to war in Iraq in the first place.

And the number who feel success there is likely has shrunk from 83% in 2004 to about 50% today. A surprising 13% say there should be no U.S. troops in Iraq at all. […]

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents think today’s military is stretched too thin to be effective.

Maybe Shailagh Murray should consider this before smearing Dems on national television?

Democrats let themselves be painted as the weak anti-military party and, once established, perceptions like that die hard. So, if the Dems are doing something related to the military, it must be harmful to the military. One doesn’t need to do any research or even think to write within what is commonly known and accepted.

  • This is the kind of world where, if the Dems actually moved forward with the well-deserved impeachment of a pair of war criminals, the message would end up being “Dems Attack Troops with Unprecedented Wartime Impeachment “

  • Maybe The Carpetbagger Report should be compulsory reading for all political correspondents.

  • Maybe the reporter in Shailagh Murray should climb to the tall of a very tall building and take a dive, and the rest of her should look for another career?

    As an Authorized Administration Speaking Orifice (AASO) perhaps?

  • Goldilocks – I’ll bet the real “political correspondents” do read this, and TPM, and Atrios, and AmericaBlog, and FiredogLake, and Greenwald, and maybe a few others. If they don’t they are probably not very good.

  • Do they just get swept up in “republicans rule” thinking like participants in a lynch mob or what. Her comments make no sense. Withdrawal has been on the table for a long time now and this bill is not calling for emergency withdrawal leaving the soldiers to fend for themselves or anything. So what is she talking about to be so condescending to the Democratic proposal. It’s what most of America wants and we should be the ones whose opinions should most matter, not a minority of republicans.

    When will these reporters understand we elected these people to office because they agreed to represent our needs and desires and not because we are too stupid to do it ourselves.

    We demand withdrawal, the Democrats have come up with legislation to begin doing this and have a majority of votes from the House and Senate and Senate republicans in the majority use a filibuster to block the amendment from even being voted on, causing everyone to halt what the majority wants because a few republicans just “can’t get their heads around” it to the point of saying maybe it might hurt the troops.
    Is the word “absurdity” even in this reporter’s vocabulary?

    Where do they get these people?

  • once established, perceptions like that die hard.

    Like the Republicans being the party of fiscal probity and balanced budgets. That hasn’t been true in a while, but it’s one of those ‘everybody knows’ things. regardless.

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