Harry Reid actually stood up to President Bush. Reid is vowing to keep the Senate in session during Thansgiving break to prevent any recess appointment.
It's a shrewed, smart, calculating political move I applaud Reid for doing this and taking a stand.
Hopefully, he wont back down on this one.
Harry Reid is expected to hold the Senate in session ALL NIGHT tomorrow night to get a consensus on Iraq.
The GOP is expected to filibuster and the Democrats are expected to fail.
But they're going to go down fighting and keeping their opponents sleep deprived.
I'll be blogging it until I pass out at the keyboard.
Just Brilliant.
I give Harry Reid props for thinking outside the box. What? Tell me you didn't think Bush was trying to hold on to Gonzales until the next Senate recess.
Here's a list of other phrases Harry Reid could have used to explain the war;
"a mission that is impossible to achieve militarily."
"Already won, there is nothing more our soliders can do"
"A mission only the Iraqis can win."
"A flawed plan that cannot be achieve with force"
"Lost" implies failure. It implies those on the ground failed. They didn't fail, the administration failed. Don't take it out on the troops.
The war is "lost," but that word is not something good to use until after the fact, The war is "won as best as it can" probably would've been a better remark.
You know the Republicans salvate over the possibility to pushing the Democrats into a corner where they can be looked at as weak, defeatist and cowardly. Don't give them any ammo they can use to brainwash the American people into thinking they're "brave" again.
In the wake of the veto threat from President Bush of the emergency supplemental bill that includes a withdrawal date, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid now says he will support completely cutting funds for the war after March 31, 2008. That gives the president eleven and a half months to tell the Iraqi government to get its goddamn act together. Sure, Iran and Al-Qaeda will claim victory if we end the war now, but they've already won. They won when Saddam fell. They won when botched this entire war. We won when the Republican Congress refused to ask tough questions about the war and when President Bush refused to get rid of those who screwed this war up. Iran always had influence in Iraq, the only other country in the Muslim world with a Shiite majority. We could pretend like everything is going fine, hide from reality, force everyone into an ultra-nationalist "we can never be defeated" view of the world and stay the course like it's going to do anything, or we can accept the reality of the situation, that our leadership has screwed up this war so badly it's beyond fixable, get out with the best face we can and stare down Iran by putting our military back together, putting our country back together (with new leadership next year,) and learn from our mistakes. What happened in Iraq sucked, it sucks that it ended this way. It sucks that we screwed this up, but it's nobody's fault but this administration. It's nobody else's fault. Personally, I am inclined to let the Bush administration continue down their dead end road for the rest of their time in power, then let new leadership next year fix the problem and show what a failure this administration was, but this mistake is not worth one more American life. The longer we stay there and fight for everyone else, the stronger Iran gets, the more they can prowl around the Persian Gulf with nobody countering their power. The more they can develop nukes and threaten people, with no one to stop them. The longer we referee Iraq, the more the Taliban gains power in Afghanistan, the stronger Al-Qaeda gets thanks to the fact we have, at least in words only, proved their point. It is time for us to admit this mistake, admit reality, and move on. We must keep strong and keep the faith in America, cause it won't be long before we have to take on Iran, a much larger, much more powerful country, and when we did, we CANNOT screw that up too.
