A step forward - From Fox News "Iraqi Cabinet Approves Draft Law for Oil Distribution": "The Iraqi Cabinet approved a draft law Monday to manage the country's vast oil industry and distribute its wealth among the population — a major breakthrough in U.S. efforts to press the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups to reach agreements to achieve stability."
Could it be that the surge is working? It's "fish or cut bait" time for the Democrats.
2 comments:
From the "Fish or cut bait" link:
I just don't think the have the political cojones to do that. And because they don't, I think, at some point, there will be a heavy political price to pay. Interestingly I also feel that if they actually did defund it, they'd also pay a heavy political price. A real 'no-win' situation of their own making.
It's lovely to imagine that this war is somehow going to be surgically removed from Bush and the GOP and attached to the Democrat Party. But that's simply not going to happen, no matter how many conservatives squawk "Where's YOUR solution? Where's YOUR solution?"
The contrast is clear. Most Republicans want our involvement in the war to continue; most Democrats want it to stop. The GOP's "no-win scenario" already occurred last November. Not a single Democrat incumbent lost their race. No wins. And now the damaged GOP either has to stand firm behind its roundly rejected policy, or they have to flip, flop, and splinter.
Either the GOP loses control of their war, or the war continues and they absorb further electoral punishment in 2008. Now that's a "no-win situation."
Matt Taibbi:
One thing that's obvious is that the Bush era is not only dead, it's buried. You could see that easily enough watching the plight of poor Mitch McConnell, the gray-faced Senate minority leader put in charge of rebuffing the Democrats' half-assed anti-war effort.
In fact, the Republicans may have breathed their last gasp in the Senate, in an overplayed procedural gambit designed to prevent the Democrats from making their empty gesture against the Iraq War. The gambit in question was Mother Superior McConnell's filibuster of the pathetic nonbinding Warner resolution.
On the surface, the filibuster was a brilliant idea, a diabolical ploy designed to expose the Democrats as pretenders in the anti-war effort. What McConnell was really doing was tying debate over the meaningless Warner amendment to a resolution with real teeth: the so-called Gregg amendment, sponsored by New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, which would have asked senators to cast a vote promising that they would never defund the troops in Iraq.
This was basically an all-in play in a game of political Texas Hold 'em. The Republicans knew that if the Democrats bought the basic premise behind the Gregg amendment -- the idea that there is no middle ground between victory and surrender that they would fold rather than risk casting a vote "against the troops."
McConnell apparently knew this, so he poison-pilled the Warner amendment by lashing Gregg to its hull, certain that his Democratic counterpart, the hypercautious career bureaucrat Harry Reid, would much sooner allow the filibuster than let the dangerous Gregg amendment through.
McConnell was right, and had this been a few years ago, when every move the Republicans made looked smart, he would have been hailed as a genius who hung the cowardly Democrats with their own rope.
Instead, McConnell woke up on Tuesday and found himself bashed in every major newspaper in the country as an obstructionist fuckhead. Everywhere, it seemed, the Washington rules of engagement were trumped by public anger over the continuing war disaster. Then, a day later, five Republicans who had voted for the filibuster defected, signing a letter vowing to "explore all our options" to get the Warner resolution to the floor.
"No one ever entertained the possibility that [the filibuster] would be a dead end," said Maine Republican Olympia Snowe. The same Republicans who acted as one with iron discipline early in Bush's reign were now selling each other out and cutting their own deals at every opportunity.
It was a grand old time for the Grand Old Party, an era when the baldest idiocies went unpunished, and even Iraq in flames seemed like fireworks for the party. But the clock struck midnight, and Mitch McConnell was left holding the reins of the pumpkin, wondering what the hell went wrong.
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