Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. made his demand that the House pass a deadline to withdraw from Iraq, which the Republicans modified to an idiotically simplistic and totally unreasonable bill to withdraw immediately in an effort to put the Democrats on record as demanding an immediate pullout from Iraq. Why?
Here is the difference between Murtha’s proposal and the one the Republicans demanded a vote on.
Dave Johnson explains.
Note how he describes the building of a narrative.
As I have written before, the war in Iraq is going very badly and the Republicans do not want to be left as the responsible parties when the elections come around next November. (Continued below)
As I have written before, the war in Iraq is going very badly and the Republicans do not want to be left as the responsible parties when the elections come around next November. So Bush will pull many or most of the troops out of Iraq beginning next Spring or Summer and will have done it by early October 2006. (I have been consistently writing this since last January.) But removing the troops is an admission of failure, right?
So the Republicans are preparing to blame the Democrats for undercutting the mission in Iraq. This is going to be the Republican message in the Fall of 2006 leading to the election. Dave Johnson provides the most chilling explanation of that the Republicans are doing. “Part of this narrative is clearly intended to give the troops someone to blame for the deaths of their comrades. The Rght wants them coming back home bitter, believing they were betrayed.”
The Republican Party controls the House, the Senate and the Presidency. The Republican Party decided to go to war in Iraq with no real justification. The war is going badly largely because of the Republican administration incompetence. So they want out before they take a hit in the November 2006 election. They are working hard now to blame the Democrats for their failure.