0/18=Passing Grade

Ir's amazing that you can just lie on a report about Iraq, and not even lie well, and Republicans will just buy it:

Stemming a revolt among Senate Republicans, President Bush appeared Thursday to win two more months for his "surge" strategy in Iraq after arguing that U.S. forces had made some progress and needed time to make the country more secure.

Issuing a report to Congress on the war, Bush acknowledged that Iraqi leaders had made little headway in resolving the political conflicts that have paralyzed the government and fueled sectarian violence.

But he appealed to nervous Republicans to stand firm, arguing that lawmakers should not impose their judgments on the commander in chief.

"I don't think Congress ought to be running the war. I think they ought to be funding the troops," Bush said at a White House news conference.

Leading Republicans said they remained skeptical that the buildup of 30,000 troops would work, but they appeared to have accepted the president's plea to wait until a more comprehensive Pentagon assessment is released Sept. 15 before trying to force any change in course.

"In deference to the president … I think it's important that we wait until all the facts are in in September," said John W. Warner (R-Va.), former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. Warner is working on a proposal that would call on the president to make plans to remove U.S. troops from most combat operations.

Unless there are significant improvements in Iraq in the next two months, lawmakers say, the president will almost certainly face a mutiny within his party's ranks.

RIIIIGHT. Because they're so known for exercising independent judgment.

Do these Republicans not know that this President has said "we're making good progress" consistently for four years, and if that was always true Iraq would have sent a manned spaceflight to Mars last week? Here's a refresher:



In this era of extreme partisanship, expecting the other side to get the message is simply a fool's errand. The GOP only needs 34 votes to sustain vetoes and keep the country at war, and defectors are not forthcoming. To that end, I think there's reason for concern and reason for optimism.

On the one hand, Thers is absolutely right in this brilliant post that this stalemate is a function of a Constitution that cannot move quickly against a committed actor.

It is traditional in Unhinged Liberal Blogger Rants to declare that the administration has shredded, torn, violated, peed on, pooped on, showed contempt towards, blew their nose on, and otherwise disregarded the Constitution. As an Unhinged Liberal Blogger who specializes in invective and ranting, I have certainly said so myself.

But I think this emphasis may be misplaced. The modern GOP (and that’s where the trouble lies, with the party as a whole) has not so much violated the Constitution as they have exploited it. Take the war funding resolution mess, or indeed any attempt thus far by the Democratic Senate in particular to keep the Bushites from doing whatever the hell they want in Iraq, no matter how crazy or destructive. It is not a violation of the Constitution that is shielding the regime from having to face the music here — it is a perfectly constitutional mechanism, the filibuster [...]

The real problem is not that the GOP is breaking the Constitution (or at least this is not always the problem), but that the Constitution is itself flawed. That much should be obvious in a moment like now, when a president who enjoys remarkably little public support (pdf) can carry on a war that nobody much cares for, either (the lunatic fringe that is the Right Wankosphere excluded). I mean, I have to think that if we had a European parliamentary system Bush would have cratered no later than last year and tanked a no confidence vote — and the new government could have begun withdrawing troops. In our system, there is just not much that can be done. Likewise, impeachment, while, yes, richly justified, just cannot happen because of American institutional realities. Our Constitution is just not set up to cope expeditiously with the modern GOP, for whom party loyalty at any cost counts for everything. This weakness was never so glaring as when the Republicans held the White House, House, and Senate: a GOP Congress was just never going to check or balance a Republican White House.

I'm sure a lot of excellent medical books were written in the 18th century as well, but if we still followed them, we'd be prying leeches off the dead. The Constitution was amended many times until we had some collective dose of Reaganism and decided this was the best country and the best document and every word should be followed as if we were still wearing powdered wigs and signing things with quills. It's American exceptionalism that's at the heart of this problem, a belief that we've created the best society in the history of the world and that therefore nothing should ever be changed in it. We may have done the former but it doesn't presuppose the latter.

Now, the GOOD news is that every four years we get to act like something resembling a Parliamentary democracy, and despite the tons of money and deceptive advertising and robocalls and all the rest, when you screw up a brand this much, you're going to crash, which is why I think the Republican nomination for President is actually a $100 million dollar waste of time.

(Thomas) Jefferson believed that the Federalists had overplayed their hand—that they had manipulated threats from abroad to seize for themselves vastly greater powers than the Constitution permitted them. He also believed that their demonization and mistreatment of the political opposition was an abuse of the powers of office and an assault upon the body politick. Adams had used the power of criminal prosecution to destroy the reputations of dozens of opposition political leaders, and to throw many of them behind bars. (snip)

Jefferson was severely critical of Adams’s conduct of the presidency, and most historical judgment has been with him. He termed Adams’s tactics as “divide and conquer.” “This is not new,” he wrote to John Taylor, “it is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.

Jefferson had a different vision of America. He believed that America must be a land that tolerates different views, even differing views of external (and internal) threats. And it was the responsibility of the different parties to watch the proceedings of the other party and make them known to the people.

We have been through a six year reign of witches. They have used the same sort of hysterical rhetoric and fear that Adams used. And as each successive public opinion poll tells us, the spell is wearing off, and a time for accounting is coming.

Jefferson had the right formula to counter their misdeeds. In involved civil courage, standing for the principles that the Constitution enshrined and returning the Federalists’ verbal assaults in kind. Silence and inaction are not acceptable answers. Patriots stand their ground and raise their voices.

It's cold comfort for those dying and suffering for the futile plans of this man right now, and it's going to take an incredible amount of work to reverse this course. But the reign of witches is definitely coming to an end; not as fast as we'd all like, but soon enough to save the Republic.