Out of Iraq

There's all sorts of commotion going on in Washington these days. It seems like, with the Democrats in charge of Congress again, some Repubs are mucking out the back of their closets and digging out the garage to find a copy of the constitution. That would be the pre-Rove constitution, the one that has Congressional oversight in it.

A bunch of "moderate" Repub congressmen wen to see Georgie yesterday, and told him - to his face! - that the Iraq war is sinking the party and they won't hold the line with him forever. Whew! Talking reality to a deranged personality like Georgie can be tricky business.

Here's how it went:

Participants in Tuesday's White House meeting said frustration about the Iraqi government's efforts dominated the conversation, with one pleading with the president to stop the Iraqi parliament from going on vacation while "our sons and daughters spill their blood." The House members pressed Bush and Gates hard for a "Plan B" if the current troop increase fails to quell the violence and push along political reconciliation. Davis said that administration officials convinced him there are contingency plans, but that the president declined to offer details, saying that if he announced his backup plan, the world would shift its focus to that contingency, leaving the current strategy no time to succeed.

Tough stuff! "Pleading" and "pressing" are things you just don't do to the First Frat Boy. And asking for a Plan B? That's like asking him to resign in disgrace. You know, not right now.

Because the mysterious Plan B, which has not been mentioned before, is such a corker that if anyone was told about it, it's what they'd want for sure. You'd think a Plan B that good would somehow morph into Plan A, because the current Plan A, frankly, sucks.

And then there's a bunch of talk about what the Dems are going to do about the war funding bill, and how the Repubs will react to which plan. It's all very telling of the Washington culture; around 57% of the public wants to get out of the useless blood war, right effing now. Only a fifth of the public thinks anything is going right, and that's the fifth that thought the Great Depression was "spiffy."

And so they fiddle in Washington while Baghdad burns. As the Repubs just old Georgie so rudely, he and the congress are politicking while "our sons and daughters spill their blood."

As the great Glenn Greenwald pointed out yesterday when discussing the far-right's elimination of habeas corpus (and the Dems sad acquiescence to it), there is no time to waste, and there is no room for politics. It's a fundamental bedrock principle that the nation was founded on.

It is, as is the war funding, bigger than party. It's what the US was originally designed for. Look: the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, understood that fanatical extremist bloodthirsty totalitarians could cheat enough to in elections over the course of time. That's why they built in effective checks and balances, and a free press.

Well, the free press thing is broken worse than the government itself. The authoritarians have taken over government and embedded their spore in every department. But the Congress managed to free itself, and it must act.

Habeas corpus? No brainer - stand up for your country and vote. Stop a bloody and purposeless war? Just do it.