cross-posted at skippy and a veritable cornucopia of other community blogs.
jane, citing scarecrow and kargox, stumbles upon the truth:
scarecrow and kagro x have noted that the white house may be anxious to have a showdown over the firing of the us attorneys because they know there’s going to be a battle over something and there are other matters they are even less anxious to have probed by congress.
jane goes on to perhaps disagree, thinking that the investigation into the attorney firings could lead to something big, like tom delay.
[ed. note: we love jane, but wanting to hang something on tom delay at this point in the proceedings is rather like citing “the a team” as the reason tv sucks. got anything in this millennium to worry about, jane?]
while we don’t doubt that she could be right, we would ask everyone to go back to the idea that the whitehouse knows there’s going to be a battle over “something.”
we maintain that the dems know this, too, as does the mmm (multi-millionaire media).
but, as if under some secret agreement reached by all parties invovled, nobody mentions the big stuff that there ought to be a battle over.
ending the iraq war? mebbe. mebbe not. workin’ on it. we’ll get back to you in, oh, a year and a half.
impeachment? totally out of the question. don’t even bring it up again, if you know what’s good for you.
uh, guys? didn’t we elect the dems into office to specifically take care of these two problems? aren’t you folks in congress the least bit worried that if you don’t do something, and fast, the electorate will happily vote you out in 08?
sheesh, it took harry reid a whole week to even speak up about debating on fox. you’d think the dems have forgotten just how they got back into power…by our votes, dammit!
while we are happy to see congress fight the white house on anything (it’s been so long), we think that the firing of u.s. attorneys would not rank high any higher than 15 or 16 on anyone’s list of top 20 reasons to call awol out for a rumble.
we mentioned earlier bob fertik’s exasperation w/nancy pelosi for refusing to schedule barbara lee’s amendment to end the war for a vote. the blogger formerly known as armando expresses nothing but frustration at others who urge a “wait and see” attitude towards our leaders in their approach to the iraq war. and matt stoller recently cited a gallup poll showing that the dem congress’s approval ratings are falling back down to pre-election levels. dissatisfaction with our recently-elected leaders is appearing not only in blogtopia and yes, we coined that phrase, but in the rest of america, as well.
yet no actions about stopping the war (let alone impeachment, and that’s what they want us to do…let it alone) has made any progress in congress or in the media. (even the demonstrations last for the 4th anniversary of the start of the war were played down as “not as large as before” in the mmm).
but everyone’s gung-ho about proving gonzales is a sneak. ok, we concede that it’s progress. getting rid of any one of those jerks in the administration is far better than zero movement.
however, do the words “too little too late” mean anything at all to the dems in congress? they had better, in our humble opinion, wake up and smell the constituent anger. a do-nothing dem congress can raise the ire of the voting public just as much as a do-nothing publican congress did.
we would suggest those on the hill read this op-ed piece from the madison, wis. capital times:
rather, it was remarkable because these veterans have come to the same conclusion that has been reached by a growing number of honest critics of the war: that if we are determined to bring the troops home, we have to communicate our seriousness.
we cannot campaign for “nonbinding resolutions.”
we need to express our seriousness by sending a signal that we feel the need to end this occupation of a foreign land is so pressing that we are prepared to speak even of impeaching the men who promise to maintain their military misadventure for so long as they occupy the white house.
there are millions of americans who would like to impeach george bush and dick cheney for the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors that have been associated with the names of these errant executives over the past six years. for instance, polls suggest that a majority of americans favor impeachment if it is proved that the president lied to the america people about the reasons for going to war in iraq…
we are not talking about stained blue dresses anymore. we are talking about a war that has cost more than 3,000 lives and ruined tens of thousands more (need we mention walter reed?), a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of iraqi lives, a war that is emptying our federal treasury at a rate of $200 million a day.
impeachment, as intended by the founders who created a system of checks and balances in order to “chain the dogs of war,” is a political act initiated, at its best, with the purpose of preventing a president from maintaining a course of action that affronts the constitution, endangers the republic or damages democracy.
the war in iraq does all of these things. and yet, as the bush-cheney administration proposes to surge 21,500 more young americans into the quagmire in iraq, and as the congress debates nonbinding resolutions that, by virtue of their very names, are guaranteed to be inconsequential, there are those who would dare suggest that impeachment initiatives might distract the house and senate.
there is no more serious work than ending the war.
amen.
