Are
The Congressional
Democrats Spineless?
By John A. Murphy
10 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The Associated Press released
a report on March 8th detailing Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi’s
plan to force the Bush administration to withdraw US troops from Iraq
by Fall 2008 (pretty close to the time John Kerry, in his failed 2004
presidential bid, promised to withdraw them after a
surge of 40,000 troops).
According to UN estimates,
that means US forces will kill another 60,000 innocent Iraqi men, women
and children by the proposed September 1, 2008 deadline. This of course
assumes that the level of violence in the next two years does not increase
over the level of violence in the last two years. An assumption that
is more and more tenuous.
The bill being presented
by the House Democrats goes even further than killing another 60,000
people in Iraq; it adds another $1.2 billion to President Bush’s
request for the continuation of the war in Afghanistan.
Rephrasing the Democrats
startling challenge to President Bush would look something like this:
“we demand that you only kill 60,000 more innocent people in Iraq.
We further demand that you limit the deaths of American soldiers to
another 1,800 and that the number of morbidly wounded soldiers must
not exceed 30,000; then you must stop the war. Since we know this is
going to be a difficult decision for you Mr. President, we will help
you out by allowing you to kill another 10,000 more people in Afghanistan”.
Since the Democrats were
clearly elected with a mandate to end the war and, given that President
Bush will surely veto this legislation anyway, why would the Democratic
leadership propose legislation that would kill another 60,000 innocent
Iraqis and 1,800 Americans before finally bringing the war to an end?
The Associated Press report suggests that this was a compromise bill
that would satisfy “liberal Democrats” reluctant to vote
for continued funding without driving away “more moderate Democrats”.
The Democratic leadership fears that without a united party they would
suffer an embarrassing defeat when the legislation reaches a vote later
this month. Does this make any sense at all?
If the Marketing vice president
wants his company to introduce a new product in six months but Finance
and Operations are opposed to such an introduction they may be able
to reach a compromise date for the introduction of the new product.
With this kind of compromise a win-win situation can be created and
nobody is going to die or become morbidly wounded as a result.
Organizations, regardless
of their raison d’être, must have stated goals and a strategy
for achieving those goals. The strategy is formulated after evaluating
the strengths and weaknesses of various alternatives. What no organization
wants to do in strategy formulation is sacrifice the long run on the
altar of the short. No organization wants success in the short run if
it means disaster in the long run. The congressional Democrats have
decided that they would rather sacrifice the lives of innocent Iraqis
and Americans than risk losing the war as an election issue in 2008.
This is what happens when organizations operate without values, vision,
a clear sense of direction and effective leadership. They lose the ability
to identify, evaluate and set clearly achievable goals.
The Democratic House has
drafted legislation which has no chance of surviving a presidential
veto and at the same time does not meet the hopes and aspirations and
demands of the overwhelming majority of the American voting public.
They have however drafted legislation that makes them feel good. Somehow
or other the so-called “liberal Democrats” are going to
be happy about supporting a bill which would kill 60,000 Iraqis and
1,800 Americans because the bill will not alienate the “more moderate
Democrats”.
It is difficult to determine
which group of Democratic legislators is more odious; the “liberal
Democrats” who purport to want an immediate end to the Iraqi war
but will compromise by letting another 60,000 people die in the name
of party unity or the “more moderate Democrats” who have
no problem murdering another 60,000 Iraqis so that they do not give
the impression that they are tying the hands of the military commanders.
This bears repeating. The
congressional Democrats know that President Bush will veto this proposed
legislation but he could not veto legislation that did not provide the
additional funds necessary for the continued prosecution of the war.
Furthermore, even if the congressional Democrats in the House failed
to pass legislation that would cut funding for the war, the Senate Democrats
could filibuster legislation requiring its continued funding. It would
only take 41 of the 51 Senate Democrats to accomplish this effective
ending of the war!
Democratic Party loyalist
themselves have often suggested that the congressional Democrats are
spineless; that they fear a real confrontation with the Republicans
and that this explains why the Democratic Party has drifted so far to
the right as to be no longer recognizably different from the Republican
Party.
In order to be “spineless”,
however, the congressional Democrats would first have to have some concept
of courage or morality. There is no evidence in the decision-making
process of the congressional Democrats that questions of courage or
morality are ever even considered. Terms like “good” and
“evil”, “courageous” and “spineless”
are applicable only to those who permit conscience to enter into the
decision-making process. Conscience is clearly not a metric evaluated
by the congressional Democrats in their strategy formulation process.
The only variables considered worthy of evaluation by the congressional
Democrats are party unity and the vote-getting utility of a continued
war on their 2008 congressional and presidential election aspirations.
There are many words which might aptly describe the Congressional Democrats
but certainly not “spineless”. One must question, however,
whether those who continue to vote for the Democrats year after year
are indeed themselves invertebrate.
When the Democrat Party workers
start trolling for votes a year and a half from now they will tell the
nibblers to “hold your nose and vote for the Democrats. After
all, what are you going to do, vote for a Republican?” The appropriate
response should be “no, I won’t vote for Republican but
I can no longer associate myself with the bottom feeders called Democrats.
I’ll vote for an independent candidate or perhaps a Green Party
candidate. I will stand with Martin Luther King and remember that “there
comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor
politic nor popular but we must take it because our conscience tells
us that it is right”.
*You've been hoodwinked.
You've been had.*
*You've been took. You've
been led astray, run amuck.*
*You've been bamboozled.*
*--Malcolm X*
John Murphy
is the independent candidate for House of Representatives in the 16th
Congressional District of Pennsylvania. He has been endorsed by Michael
Berg, Peter Camejo, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn. He has
been endorsed by two county level Green Parties, two county
level Libertarian Parties, the Pennsylvania Reform Party, the New American
Independent Party of Pennsylvania and the GDI among others. He is also
one of the founding members of the Pennsylvanian Ballot Access Coalition
http://www.paballotaccess.org,
working to change ballot
access laws in Pennsylvania. He can be reached at:[email protected]