| The great Carl Levin-authored Democratic plan to own the war is on schedule, as now Norm Coleman wants a withdrawal, the same withdrawal that bipartisan groups are going to endorse because it's not actually, you know, a withdrawal.
Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota says he now supports withdrawing 5,000 troops from Iraq before the end of the year, a plan proposed by Sen. John Warner of Virginia.
5000 troops, wow. That's amazing. So we'll only have 35,000 more troops in Iraq than we had just after the public voted to end the war in November, 2006. Awesome. How bipartisan.
Seriously, the John Warner retirement festivities a few days ago were just nauseating. Warner's a vain Republican that sends other people to die for his ego. I just don't get the 'he was so wonderful and oh check out his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor and also what a smart wise man he knew a lot about missiles' line that came from every news outlet all at once. Warner voted for Bush's war and kept voting for it for five years. That's a very bad, not a very good, thing. And it's not bipartisanship or independence of mind. It's just being manipulated by a stupid, craven greedy, and bloodthirsty spoiled brat, at best.
Also, Edwama, please listen to Matthew Yglesias on how to 'shake up the 2008 race' and, subtext, beat Hillary Clinton.
Honestly, this doesn't seem like brain surgery to me -- the chance-taking, things-shaking-upping position to take would be to join Bill Richardson in calling for a real withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The fact that none of the main three candidates have engaged with each other on the Iraq issue and, instead, all seem to have combined to prevent efforts by Biden (from the right) and Richardson (from the left) to make this a big deal seems pretty weird to me.
I know lots of people want the grand netroots to make our grand endorsement of the one true Presidential candidate and thereby rock the foundations of the universe, but, um, speaking only for every person who has ever blogged, ever, anywhere, I'll point out that by and large I don't want to endorse someone who wants to keep troops in Iraq. And I certainly can't get excited or advocate for someone who thinks that we should continue our merry adventure abroad, regardless of how much I dislike Clinton, because as far as I can tell Edwama have the exact same position as Clinton. I'm not going to be intellectually dishonest that way and pretend there are distinctions so that I can advocate for a non-Clinton named candidate, but even if I were to throw away my credibility that way you wouldn't believe me and I wouldn't change one person's mind.
Also, while I'm doing a bit of ranting, stupid articles on what the 'netroots' does or does not do, such as this one, or this one, to take but two examples, that ignore the fact that no top-tier Democrat differs from Clinton on Iraq, are really really stupid. They are much stupider than articles (like this one by Art Levine or this one by the usually-very-good Kevin Drum) that just whine inaccurately about what 'the blogosphere' should have done as if the blogosphere is some top-down organization with centralized management that controls the Democratic party leadership rather than a network of people with somewhat highly trafficked websites held in mild disdain by most Democrats on the Hill with any decision-making authority or useful information. Although to be fair to the previous two really stupid articles, the latter two stupid articles were pretty stupid. |
