Posted on 11/15/2005 3:07:35 PM PST by MNJohnnie
100% Nailed it. Another nominee for the POST OF THE DAY!
The talk show hosts are getting people all ginned up more against the republicans than against the democrats.
Did NOT know I was the Hugh Hewitt Ping List Keeper!!! Do you got a ping list? Freeper mail me and I will ping. I do it for the Rush thread.
Gee sorry Americans. Sorry life is not a sitcom. Sorry we cannot just solve every problem in 30 mins. Sorry we cannot present you with a 100% perfect, ideological pure solution yesterday. UGGGGG!!!!
time for a breezie.....
YUM
can you please have this war all cleaned up before I get back.....
You don't want to miss Gafney. Coming up.
okay- who is Gafney?
Forgive me, I guess I have been a mainstream conservative talk kinda gal.. lol... learning about all kinds of new folks...
Gaffney is up.
Used to be deputy def sec under RR. When Gafney talks, people listen.
Gaffney may be smart, but he's a dud, deliverywise. If people listen, they'll hear something like this:
HH: Frank, how bad is this, how much of an act of treachery, how harmful to the war effort?
FG: Well, there are many phases to be taken into consideration in an endeavor so multifaceted as this... there is no question but that relations, that is, public relations, and with regards to what I like to call "Islamo-fascists," what serves the opponents of the President... well, it's not as helpful as we might have hoped, which is to say one could have wished for better.
Dan
Don't I just wish
He doesn't have the passion but the guy is smart. He does show passion on certain issues like LOST.
Did you listen? Was my total guess close?
You got it.
Keep up the fight and ignore the flack.
For all who read this, here is some info that might be pertinent.
The worst thing that could have happened for the country, and for the troops in Iraq, would have been for the democrat amendment to win. It called for a timetable which Joe Lieberman said would "send a message that I fear will discourage our troops because it seems to be heading for the door. It will encourage the terrorists, and it will confuse the Iraqi people and affect their judgments as they go forward"
Those are the words of a Democrat, but we all know they are true.
Maybe the White House and the Senate Republicans were worried about the message that would be sent if the democrats got 48-49 votes, and the "good" amendment the republicans WERE working on only got 51-55 votes. In other words, if it looked like we were split down partisan lines on a cut-and-run strategy. It would certainly I believe be GOOD for republicans in the political fight, but finding out that one political party, and half the country, want to pull a vietnam could have really hurt the war.
Further, it might have actually WON. We don't know where the RINOs were. But even if it didn't, if it emboldened our enemies and scared the Iraqis, it could have set back the war, and increased the violence -- which would play into the democrats hands, hurt the country and the republicans, and probably neutralize whatever gain we would get from labelling the democrats as anti-war, because a majority of the country would be with them.
So, maybe the white house and the republicans decided that (since the "sense of the senate" stuff is both meaningless, unenforced, AND reflects what the white house is already doing and hoping, and since the "active" part of the amendment merely calls for quarterly reports, and those are probably already covered in the "hundreds" of reports given already) it would be better to give up some short-term political advantage in order to protect the country and our troops from the fallout of a partisan vote on the issue.
So now instead the democrat measure is clearly labeled as anti-american (if we just push that), and is seen as being "repudiated" (that was the headline in most papers, or the sub-headline). The White house gets tagged with a "rebuke" from the Senate (a rebuke from republicans and democrats alike, so it's not a partisan thing), and the measure is seen by all as SUPPORTING the troops by giving a better sense of what is ahead.
Since the white house has done a pretty poor job of communicating how well things are going, and what the general plans are, this is probably the best we could hope for -- but it might well have been (and I've heard some rumblings that this is the case) a calculated decision by the White house and Senate Republicans to "take one" for the good of the country.
This goes back to my comment of last night, that in the end doing what is right for the country and our troops is more important than winning short-term political battles. And since it is clear that this war in Iraq was not fought as well as it "could" have been, taking some measure of "rebuke" isn't altogether unexpected.
I don't think anybody really argues that, if we went back to March, in hindsight we couldn't have done better in the aftermath of the war. Never mind that (I believe) many of the near-term problems were caused because we spent TOO MUCH TIME looking for the WMDs that weren't there, which led to other problems. If we knew not to look for them, we could have focused on other early peace-keeping and rebuilding efforts. We also wouldn't have rounded up people trying to find the WMD, which may have made some people resentful.
We have a unique opportunity. Many democrats (I heard Chris Dodd I think on Imus this morning) are insisting that, knowing what we know now, we would NEVER have voted for the war. We need to attack them for this on two fronts: First, that pulling out their support like that hurts our troops, and Second we need to push their claim to its conclusion -- Would Iraq be better with Saddam still there, with no knowledge of Oil-For-Food, with sanctions likely lifted and his WMD programs reconstituted?
The real problem with the war was NOT that we invaded, but how we fumbled the aftermath. I'm not blaming, I'm just stating what I think is fact. So, if the REPUBLICANS could go back, we wouldn't NOT do the war, we would simply have fixed the PROBLEM, which was the aftermath. The DEMOCRATS want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, giving up the gains in Iraq, probably hurting Afghanistan since Iraq would be a base for the Taliban, Libya still having Nucs, Syria still in Lebanon. Saddam with a reconstituted WMD program and billions of dollars to pursue Nucs.
Just for the record, I was mistaken on that point. See link below for details.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1513207/posts?page=1214#1214
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