Saturday, May 26, 2007

Stalemate

[Originally posted on goofyblog 4.5.07]



Matt Taibbi comments on the political situation in Washington vis a vis continually re-funding the War in Iraq, instead of ending it:

In my visits to Washington in the past few months I’ve heard different stories from Democratic congressional aides about what the party’s intentions are. Some say they think the leadership is just going to stall and pass a bunch of non-binding, symbolic, Kumbayah horseshit to help propel whoever the Democratic candidate is into the White House two years from now.

Others claim with a straight face that all of these non-binding resolutions are only a start, that the strategy is to really end the war via a death-by-a-thousand-cuts type of legislative grind, with the leadership sending to the floor bill after bill after bill designed to eat away at either war policy or war funding. They claim that all of these votes are exercises in coalition-building, necessary steps to gathering the support needed to pass real biting measures later on.

But I’ll believe that when I see it. Right now, it all looks too convenient. With Bush a thrashing, drowning lame-duck whose endorsement in ‘08 will almost certainly be political poison to whomever has the misfortune to earn it, Republicans like Hagel and Oregon Senator Gordon Smith are conspicuously free to break ranks and save themselves.

Moreover, the Democratic measure is crafted in such a way that the Hagels and Smiths and Ben Nelsons of the world can safely get on a soapbox about the war without having to face accusations of depriving the troops of equipment and “what they need” to fight, which just so happens to be the leitmotif/preoccupation of the Rush/Hannity talk shows of late.

You’ll know that something real is going on in Washington when either a) the Democrats force the “antiwar conservatives” to actually cast a vote on whether or not to cut off spending for the war, or b) a dozen or so more Republicans cross the picket line to set up a possible override of a Bush veto.

Until and unless one of those unlikely moments arrives, it sure looks like what we’ve got is one of those rare “good for both teams” baseball trades, an arranged standoff in which everybody gets to suck a little of that hot nourishing blood in the ballooning antiwar poll numbers.


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