WP, pg1: Democrats Aim to Block Funds for Bush's Iraq Plan

[DeepModem Mom]

Democrats Aim to Block Funds for Plan
By Jonathan Weisman and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 11, 2007; Page A01

Senior House Democrats said yesterday that they will attempt to derail funding for President Bush's proposal to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, setting up what could become the most significant confrontation between the White House and Congress over military policy since the Vietnam War.

Senate Democrats at the same time will seek bipartisan support for a nonbinding resolution opposing the president's plan, possibly as early as next week, in what some party officials see as the first step in a strategy aimed at isolating Bush politically and forcing the beginning of a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from the conflict.

The bold plans reflect the Democrats' belief that the public has abandoned Bush on the war and that the American people will have little patience for an escalation of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. But the moves carry clear risks for a party that suffered politically for pushing to end an unpopular war in Vietnam three decades ago, and Democratic leaders hope to avoid a similar fate over the conflict in Iraq.

The striking new approach took shape yesterday morning during a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), invoked Martin Luther King Jr. as she urged her members against timidity, members who were there said. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), a quiet, hawkish supporter of the war, stunned many of his colleagues when he came out strenuously against Bush's proposal and suggested the war is no longer militarily winnable.

Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense and the party's leading voice for withdrawing troops, is to report back to Appropriations Committee members today on hearings and legislative language that could stop an escalation of troops, said Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), a member of Murtha's subcommittee....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011002613.html

[Kagemusha]

1. It's an uphill battle but, credit to them for trying.

Taking any risk when Bush is hanging himself with his own rope constitutes boldness, given the fright of taking any stance against the war in the years prior to the midterm victory.

[Peace Patriot]

2. There was never any political danger to a stance against the war, posed by

the American people. 56% of the American people opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, before the invasion (Feb. 03). They then shut up for a couple of weeks during the invasion, with US troops at max risk, and then the numbers against the war went right back up to nearly 60%, and stand at 70% today--combined with a whole lot of other stats showing amazing 60% to 70% opposition to every Bush Junta policy, foreign and domestic, since before the 2004 elections.*

So, why have politicians been so timid? One reason is that anyone who gathers steam as an antiwar leader, if they pose any real danger of taking the White House and can't be bribed, intimidated, "swift-boated" or taken down by the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, will be killed.** But probably the main reason for timidity is that the War Democrats colluded with the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney--to change America's election system to electronic voting run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, which has resulted in a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists. It is extremely difficult for anyone who truly represents the American people to get elected in this circumstance. They have to win way more votes than the machine programming can handle--along with the other handicaps of insufficient money and hostile media. The voters did their best to overcome all this in '06, and elected a number of true representatives of the people, giving the Democrats a good majority in the House, and a bare majority in the Senate (which would be much bigger, but for Diebold/ES&S and the fact that only 1/3 of the Senate was up for reelection this time). But we still don't have a very representative Congress. I repeat, SEVENTY PERCENT of the American people want this war ended. Not only that, a poll posted at DU during Israel's attack on Lebanon, showed 84% of the American people opposed to any US participation in a widened Mideast war. Yet Congress has to dick around with a non-binding resolution against escalation of the Iraq war (escalation, not ending it), and build support simply for de-funding the escalation (not ending it). They should be impeaching this president now, today, yet they still don't have the strength in numbers to do that--to impeach the most criminal regime in our history!--and are letting him create conditions for war on another country, Iran!

The danger to politicians who oppose the Iraq War comes from the "military-industrial complex" and the fascists who now control it, not from the people of this country.


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*(The 50% who believed that Saddam had WMDs and/or had something to do with 9/11, must be seen in this context--the context of 56% early opposition to the war, and rising opposition over three years time (now at 70%). Obviously, SOME of those people who had this disinformation rattling around in their heads ALSO didn't believe Bush that it was worth a war. This is a very important bit of analysis, indicating that the majority of Americans continued to think for themselves, to distrust Bush and to adhere to American principles and ethics, despite 24/7 propaganda. This--and the 63% who oppose torture "under any circumstances" (May '04)--are why I haven't moved to Ireland. The American people have been getting a bum rap from everybody--from the left who call them "sheeple" to the right which doesn't give a crap what the majority of Americans believe or want. The American people have been unfairly slandered, and disempowered, and, above all, DISENFRANCHISED, is my point. 56% would be a landslide in a presidential election--and it WAS!!!)

**(Senator Paul Wellstone was clearly headed for the White House in 2002. He was a charismatic politician in the mode of Robert Kennedy, who had pledged to lead the fight in the US Senate against the Iraq War. In the final weeks of his campaign for reelection to the Senate, which he was winning--and as the Bush Junta geared up for the war on Iraq--his top-of-the-line small airplane, with two skilled pilots aboard, veered off from its approach to the landing field and crashed in nearby hills, for no reason, on clear day on which no other plane had trouble landing. The FBI--run by John Ashcroft whose Senate opponent Mel Carnahan had also died in a plane crash--arrived at the scene in no time and confiscated evidence. There was no public hearing, as is usual with a US Senator. No one knows who put out the war profiteering corporate news monopoly meme that 'it was the weather." Other precedents: In 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, JFK wrote executive orders withdrawing US "military advisers" from Vietnam, after he had nixed a CIA plan to invade Cuba, at the beginning of his presidency. The "military-industrial complex" (war profiteers) that Eisenhower had warned him against could not manufacture a war on Vietnam with JFK as president. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot. Five years later--and with about one million people having been slaughtered in Vietnam in the first years of LBJ's war--JFK's brother Bobby turned against that war and started a campaign for president to end the war. He was winning, headed for the White House. And, on the night of his victory in the California primary, he, too, was shot dead. The war went on for another four years--to the great profit of many, and adding the slaughter of about a million more people in Southeast Asia (under Nixon). Just prior to RFK's assassination--in March 1968--another great progressive leader was gunned down, Martin Luther King, who had come out against the Vietnam War, against political advice, in the greatest speech of his career--and possibly the greatest speech in US history--at the Riverside Church in New York. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot--that has been the fate of four great progressive leaders with potential power to end US war profiteer wars. The Anthrax Congress in 2002 (envelopes of white powder sent to Democrats) in addition to passing the Iraq War Resolution also passed the "Help American Vote for War Act" of 2002, which appropriated $3.9 billion to fast-track secretly programmed, Bushite-controlled electronic voting machines all over the country, which makes assassination obsolete as a tool of the war profiteers. Now all they have to do is write a few lines of programming code, and they can have a war profiteer President, and a rubber-stamp Congress, or even provide the illusion of democracy with a Democratic Congress that doesn't have the strength in numbers to stop a horrible war and its horrible, criminal perpetrators. )

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Yes, it's an uphill battle to stop this war--but WHY it is an uphill battle is not the American people and who they want in office, or any political danger therefrom. The American people pose no "danger" to those who want to stop this war. The "uphill battle" has been inflicted by fascists, election thieves, the corporate news monopolies and war profiteers.