Democrats Strike Deal For Bush To Serve Six More Years In Exchange For $100 In Free Capitol Hill Plumbing

Because it's the holidays, and because the Democrats don't want to be locked out of the best parties and get nasty looks and whispers that they're a bunch of Gloomy Guses, they've decided to enthusiastically fund endless war.

Congressional leaders are assembling a $500 billion package to try to resolve an impasse by providing President Bush with unfettered money for the Iraq war in exchange for new spending on popular domestic programs.

If acceptable to lawmakers and the White House, the package to be considered in the House as early as Tuesday would avert the threat of a shutdown of federal agencies and end a dispute that has lasted months and pitted Congressional Democrats against Mr. Bush and his Republican allies.

George Bush played these saps like a fox. He threatened to veto any spending bills out of hand for months. He knew that the Democrats would negotiate with themselves and never have the spine to stand up to him on Iraq, but they might want to grab some concessions out of the deal, like they did with the minimum wage in May. So instead of having that duplicate, he tied war funding to the impasse over spending bills that he created. And the Democratic dupes went right along with it.

The decision to free some money for the war without a deadline or goal for withdrawal would represent a major concession by Democrats. They had earlier said they would not send Mr. Bush any more war money this year unless he accepted a change in Iraq policy.

Under the Democratic plan described by senior aides, the Iraq money would be voted on separately, to allow lawmakers opposed to the war to add money for health care, education, home heating programs, border enforcement and other initiatives.

Let's get this straight. The Democrats aren't "adding" anything. The party in power gets to set the budget priorities. These are the ones that they voted through the respective Appropriations Committees. And in fact, the Democrats are giving concessions on THAT budget, too!

As envisioned, the package would exceed the president’s overall spending limit by $11 billion, down from the $22 billion that Democrats had initially sought. The amount could increase with emergency spending sought by the administration, as well as lawmakers.

So George Bush is essentially getting something he wanted in exchange for something he wanted. And this comes on a week when he was found to have lied to attempt to get us into the same kind of disastrous war in Iran.

This is truly unbelievable, and all the more so because they're not even getting something like SCHIP back in return. The votes have already been made on SCHIP that will help Democratic challengers. They could easily stick that in there, and ENDA, and AMT relief with offsets, and the kitchen sink. If you're going to capitulate on war funding, at least get SOMETHING in return.

Of course, I wouldn't fund it at all, but unlike Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel I want to end the war.

And this is priceless:

Democrats said they might still try to add some less stringent conditions to the war spending. And one noted that though they had been forced to relent, it would be the first time the president had not been given the full amount he sought.

If my gag headline at the top were true, this paragraph would read "One Democrat noted that, though they had been forced to relent, the President would only be getting one and a half more terms, not the two he had sought."

What these clowns fail to understand is that they don't have to be forced into anything. The public wants out of Iraq, and they're not going to BLAME the party who accomplishes it, they're going to PRAISE them. It's unconscionable to allow this failed occupation to go on, so Democratic cowards can get a reduced budget passed and George Bush won't call them names anymore. And, the real reason...

Democrats are hopeful that he would accept the developing plan. They would like to wind up the spending fight and break for the holidays, with House leaders still striving to finish their work by the end of next week.

Home! They want to go home! Do you know how many parties they're missing? Most of them haven't even bought their trees yet!

Well, congratulations, Democrats, look what you've bought:



UPDATE: The WaPo has a similar story, showing radical Republicans wanting to extract even more of a price from the spineless Dems, and Roy Blunt laying it out:

Blunt said yesterday that Democrats will give in on war funding, with or without additional money for domestic programs. "There's no reason to make a bad bargain," he said. "The president holds all the cards."

Sad but true.

UPDATE II: We're going to spend another $70 billion so we can watch insurgents ping-pong their way through the country in a game of Whack-A-Mole.

Al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents who have been crowded out of Baghdad and Iraq's western province of Anbar have moved north, the U.S. military said.

Many of the fighters have converged in and around the city of Mosul in Nineveh province, including Abu Ayyub-al Masri, the leader of al -Qaida in Iraq, a predominantly Iraqi group U.S. intelligence claims has foreign leadership, a New York Times correspondent reported Thursday.

"We have seen some migration of al-Qaida," said Col. Stephen Twitty, the U.S. commander of forces in the area, said. "What has driven that are the operations down south."

I thought AQI was defeated? General Petraeus told me so!