What Dems will hear no matter what they do

October 25, 2007

Salon’s Tim Grieve flagged an illustrative gem from today’s House Oversight Committee hearing, featuring testimony from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee today, Republican Rep. Chris Shays told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he “can’t think of hardly anything this new Congress, my Democratic colleagues, have done to help our soldiers win in Iraq and allow them to come home, succeeding rather than failing to help the Iraqi people live in a safe and free Iraq, free from terrorism, free from foreign intervention.”

“I frankly can’t think of hardly anything,” he repeated.

In March, the Democratically controlled House approved $124 billion in funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with a timeline for ending the Iraq war. When the president vetoed the measure, the Democratically controlled House approved the funding again without any timeline attached.

But let’s not let facts get in the way.

No, certainly not. But it’s a helpful reminder, no matter how absurd, that Dems are going to hear the same nonsense from the Republican Party and its far-right base no matter what they do — so they might as well not let fear push them into caving.

In this case, Shays — allegedly one of the more reasonable “moderates” in the GOP caucus — thinks Dems haven’t been helping the troops at all. How many Bush administration funding requests have the Democrats in Congress turned down? None. How many policy requests regarding the war have the Dems rejected? None.

But therein lies the rub: it doesn’t matter. Dems imagine all the nasty attack ads the Republicans will run against them next year on military matters and national security policy, so they cave before anyone calls them “weak” or insufficiently supportive of the troops. And then they’re called “weak” and insufficiently supportive of the troops anyway.

As Grieve put it:

Memo to Democrats: You’d still be called “soft on terrorism” if you took it upon yourself to suit up in camouflage, fly to Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden with your bare hands. If you think the Bush administration should have greater surveillance powers, approve them. If you don’t, don’t. But don’t do whatever you do thinking that the Republicans are going to wake up tomorrow and agree that you’re just as tough on terrorists as they claim to be. It hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not going to happen now.

It seems pretty obvious.

Yes, at this juncture in our national history, it is the Republicans’ dismissive arrogance that will get us to hell in a handbasket faster than you can say Vote the Rascals out in ’08! -Kevo

  • I’m thinking that if these “Dem-posers” don’t get their act together—and right quick, at that—we may have to start calling them “Phlemocrats.”

  • It seems pretty obvious.


    It seemed pretty obvious that Bush violated the FISA law, too.

    But no matter how many people pointed this out to them, the Dimocrat “leadership” thought that the best thing to do would be to give Bush a pass, and then retroactively allow the law to be violated, setting a precedent that could easily push us all the way into banana-republic status, if we’re not there already.

    We progressives have yelled bloody murder at our “leadership” over a host of issues. Bush continues to kill Americans through war, pollution, and corporate greed. He continues to wipe his butt with the constitution, grinning and daring the feckless congress to do something. We continue to yell at our “leadership”, they continue to send us form letters telling us that they’re doing everything they can.

    I guess the title of the post should be “What Dems will do no matter what they hear”

  • Shays “can’t think of hardly anything this new Congress, my Democratic colleagues, have done to help our soldiers win in Iraq and allow them to come home, succeeding rather than failing to help the Iraqi people live in a safe and free Iraq, free from terrorism, free from foreign intervention.”

    Shays is, of course, quite correct. The only thing which might have achieved all the above aims (allow our soldiers to come home, help Iraqis be free from foreign intervention etc) would have been for Shays’ Democrapic colleagues to have passed a bill which allowed Bush only enough money for a withdrawal, starting immediately. Which they hadn’t done.

  • Turn it around.

    I can’t wait until the Repugs start floating their “health care plan” later next year.

    Repugs know how to keep thumping on stuff, how to repeat themselves. Maybe it’s because they lack creativity (or intelligence), but I’ve got news for you: REPETITION IS THE ONLY THING THAT WORKS!! Duh.

    Repugs don’t care if Americans die in the street. They don’t give a damn about the middle class. Keep repeating it. Because it’s true. Don’t worry about fighting the stereotype, use them against them instead.

  • If we are “winning” the war now because of “The Surge” (TM), shouldn’t some of the credit be given to the Dems for demanding change and conducting oversight hearing on corruption and malfeasance which only hurt the war effort.

    I’d say the Dems main problem is they’re not taking credit for the successes the President and Republicans are claiming. This of course is another way of putting the right-wing accusation that the dems have “invested in defeat.”

    But the response to this is – whatever we do there will never be enough to bring the troops home for those on the right, permanent occupation was the original objective. Even if we are able to make a utopian, peaceful democracy capable of defending itself and allied with the US in the GWOT (ie no question we’ve won), their line of thinking goes that the Iraqis will not object to our presence in their country.

    The right equates leaving with defeat, regardless of the achievements and situation in Iraq. They want this to be like Germany, Japan, and Korea, but we all know those are erroneous comparisons and we must continually call for a withdrawal or it will never happen.

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