{"id":9718,"date":"2007-01-24T12:30:47","date_gmt":"2007-01-24T17:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9718.html"},"modified":"2007-01-24T12:30:47","modified_gmt":"2007-01-24T17:30:47","slug":"stop-the-impugning-of-peoples-motives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/stop-the-impugning-of-peoples-motives\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Stop the impugning of people’s motives’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee began working<\/a> this morning on how best to deal with the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. It appears that the number of committee members willing to stand up and defend the president’s latest escalation plan was about zero — the question was what the senators were prepared to do about it.<\/p>\n

Dems and Chuck Hagel are rallying behind their non-binding resolution, which Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del.) said is “not an attempt to embarrass the president. … It’s an attempt to save the president from making a significant mistake with regard to our policy in Iraq.” <\/p>\n

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind) seemed to summarize the GOP position.<\/p>\n

“I am not confident that President Bush’s plan will succeed,” said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, senior Republican on the committee.<\/p>\n

But he also said he would vote against the measure. “It is unclear to me how passing a nonbinding resolution that the president has already said he will ignore will contribute to any improvement or modification of our Iraq policy.”<\/p>\n

“The president is deeply invested in this plan, and the deployments … have already begun,” Lugar added.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t quite wrap my ahead around Lugar’s perspective. He clearly doesn’t support the president’s policy, but since Bush is intent on doing whatever he wants, Lugar seems content to shrug his shoulders and essentially say, “Well, the president’s going to do what the president is going to do,” as if the co-equal branch of government is entirely without power.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I should note that Lugar said this morning that lawmakers could spend their time “planning for contingencies.” But if Lugar is right, how will the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s planning “contribute to any improvement or modification of our Iraq policy”?<\/p>\n

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), as is frequently the case lately, tried<\/a> to set his colleagues straight, challenging them to do their duty.
\n<\/p>\n

“We’d better be damned sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder,” Hagel said in an impassioned speech in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing. “We better be as sure as you can be, and I want every one of you — every one of us 100 senators to look in that camera and you tell your people back home what you think. Don’t hide anymore. None of us.”<\/p>\n

Hagel also responded to fellow GOP committee member Richard Lugar who claimed the passing of Hagel’s resolution would likely send a show disunity between Congress and the president and show the nation’s enemies that “we are divided and in disarray.” <\/p>\n

“We fail our country if we don’t debate this — if we don’t debate this we are not worthy of our country,” Hagel said. “We fail our country.”<\/p>\n

“Stop the impugning of people’s motives,” Hagel added. “Stop the political stuff — all of us. All of us. This is much bigger than that. And if we’re not adult enough to understand that, we will loose the confidence of the American public. That’s what’s happened right now.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You tell ’em, Chuck.<\/p>\n

For what it’s worth, the number of Senate Republicans prepared to vote for some<\/i> kind of resolution, whether it be Biden-Hagel-Levin or Warner-Collins-Nelson, seems to be growing, pressure from the White House notwithstanding. The AP noted that “at least eight other Republican senators say they now back legislative proposals registering objections to Bush’s decision to boost U.S. military strength in Iraq by 21,500 troops.”<\/p>\n

Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee began working this morning on how best to deal with the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. It appears that the number of committee members willing to stand up and defend the president’s latest escalation plan was about zero — the question was what the senators were prepared to do about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}