From Stanley Rogousky on Counterpunch:
Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin all know how the game is played and they rarely object to it. In spite of some window dressing put out by John Kerry, Russ Feingold and Jack Murtha earlier this year, the Democrats fully support the occupation of Iraq and vote with their checkbooks (and our tax dollars). When Kerry and Feingold introduced a bill that would have had all American troops taken out of Iraq by 2007, it went down in flames, 87 votes to 13. On June 23rd of this year a vote to approve a $517.7 billion war budget for fiscal year 2007 (including $50 billion designated to maintain the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan) passed unanimously.
That's right. All 13 Senate Democrats who voted for the Kerry/Feingold Bill, including Kerry and Feingold, voted to keep the supply of money flowing into the Green Zone and, consequently, to the government of Nouri al-Maliki.
Nevertheless last week the Democrats decided to throw a tantrum. Nouri al-Maliki's statement condemning the Israeli attack on Lebanon threw them into a spasm of rage. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel called on Maliki to cancel his planned address before Congress. Chuck Schumer, who didn't show up for the July 26 speech at all, wondered about Maliki's loyalty to the west. "Which side is he on when it comes to the war on terror." Harry Reid and Dick Durbin demanded that Maliki make some ritualistic statement of support for Israel and against Hizbollah. And Howard Dean turned the volume up to 11, labeling Maliki an "anti-Semite" during a speech in Palm Beach, Florida.
Later in article:
"The Democratic Party's single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft," he [Peter Beinert] wrote in his editorial in the Washington Post, "it is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. Given the party's behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why".
We saw some of this yesterday at the Cantwell fundraiser.
No comments:
Post a Comment