Ouch
The Las Vegas Review-Journal, fresh off its editorial comparing Harry Reid to Bozo the Clown positively drops the hammer on Reid, Pelosi and the Democrat's transparent political stunt theater. I continue to point out that the media is increasingly angry with the Democratic "leadership" in Congress and their headlong rush to the left.
Democrats contend, "The ball is now in the president's court." If so, it's only because they've handed it back to him.
Now, mind you, the fact that the Democrats are racing to get some money into the pipeline so the troops don't run out of ammo is a good thing. Their reasons are more cynical political calculus than patriotism — they know that declaring the war lost, pulling out and leaving the Iraqis to suffer a massive bloodbath does not play well in the polls.
Remember, challenger Ned Lamont might have won his primary among left-wing Connecticut Democratic zealots last summer, but his "surrender with honor" platform promptly went down to undignified defeat at the hands of pro-war (Democrat-turned-Independent) Sen. Joseph Lieberman in the autumn general elections.
So the strategy of Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Vichy, has been to go through the motions of "trying to cut off funding for the war" so they can tell the Neville Chamberlain branch of their own constituency, "We gave it our best shot" — all the while with no intention on God's green earth of ever really seeing it happen. (Emphasis added)
This is good, because (as President Bush has rightly pointed out) announcing to the enemy the date fixed on which you intend to surrender is not exactly a recipe for victory, or even for bolstering your own troops' morale while undermining the other guys.
What's ludicrous is that the Democrats in Washington still insist they're "trying to end the war" — by which they mean they will now agree to a set of nonbinding, face-saving, endlessly re-interpretable "security benchmarks" that supposedly have to be met if the president wants to keep his forces in Babylon.
That is about as harsh as I have ever seen an editorial. And this is Harry Reid's hometown paper calling him "D-Vichy". I suspect his next reelection campaign will be a somewhat uphill battle. The media cover is going away. CNN, of all networks, ran some analyses that warned that there would be a massive problem in the entire Middle East if we just up and leave Iraq (something many of us have been pointing out all along). But the media is starting to warn about it. That, I think, is significant. That CNN is one of the first to go on record about it is a big deal.
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The Thunder Run — Friday, 4 May , 2007 @ 8:36 am
By Sam L., Friday, 4 May , 2007 @ 2:08 pm
“D-Vichy”!! I love it. Though those who don’t know much about WWII won’t get it. “Casablanca” fans will.