November 10, 2006 Posts
22:17 The Trash-talking Begins
The Trash-talking Begins
If I hadn't seen Mr. Murtha's defeatist trashtalking before, I wouldn't have believed this quote:
As for Bush's future actions in Iraq, Murtha was blunt: "He's not going to go on with this war."Just watch him continue, Mr. Murtha. No amount of trash-talking from a corrupt blow-hard will prevent him from prosecuting this war.
This war won't end just because Mr. Murtha wants to unilaterally declare defeat in Iraq. I'd dare the Democrats to cut off funding for this war. I'd dare them to try selling it to the public. If they attempt it, we'll be waiting to tell the American people about how Iran is waiting to turn Iraq into its own puppet regime and how al Qaida is just waiting to get a new training camp.
Until now, Murtha's been able to talk irrationally without accepting responsibility for his bloviations. That changed Tuesday night. With Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, they'll be held accountable for their policy decisions. It hasn't even been a full week since recapturing the majority but leading Democrats are already quickly backing away from Murtha's immediate withdrawal proposal.
The 32-year House veteran said voters had sent a message to President Bush and Republican congressional leaders. "They don't want a rubber-stamp Congress," Murtha said Tuesday night. "They want a Congress that's going to stand up."Actually, Mr. Murtha's mischaracterizing Tuesday's elections. That's typical of him. The American people didn't reject conservatism; they rejected half-hearted conservatism, which isn't conservatism at all. And don't think that Americans embraced liberalism, either. They voted against the cowardly 'moderate' Republicans. Republicans lost this far more than Democrats won. Republicans stopped governing like a majority when McCain started craving power. They stopped being a team, which led to a muddled message this fall.
What the people want, Mr. Murtha, is a congress that accepts its role in leading the nation forward. What they don't want is a congress that rejects its responsibilities of protecting the people. Fleeing Iraq without victory is the ultimate portrait in abdicating its responsibility of protecting this nation.
Not that he'll heed this warning but I'd caution Mr. Murtha from letting this go to his head. This wasn't a tidal wave that swept Republicans from office. It was the House and Senate GOP's inept leadership that led to the loss of numerous close races.
Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 10:46 PM
Comment 1 by Stop Bush! at 11-Nov-06 02:52 AM
Republicans lost this far more than Democrats won.
Yeah, we all got the talking points. As Mary Matalin said on Fox last night, "...it wasn't that the democrats won, it was that the republicans lost..." What a bunch of crap.
In your ongoing bally-hooing the GOTV effort and the brilliance of Karl Rove, you forgot that this was the third election since 2000, and the democrats have not only caught up, but surpassed the republiCON machine. In raw numbers, approximately 10 million more democrats than republiCONs voted, and:
In House races, Democrats received about 53 percent of the two-party vote, giving them a margin more than twice as large as the 2.5-percentage-point lead that Mr. Bush claimed as a "mandate" two years ago...
Krugman, NYT 11/10/09.
I'd dare them to try selling it to the public.
Why, exactly, do you think the democrats were elected? And what makes you think that the democrats are going to answer to the republiCONs? You just don't get it. The country saw through republiCON lies, deceipt, and corruption, and what they saw turned them off. Pat Robertson praying to God for a Supreme Court Justice to die; the republiCON caucus deciding it was more important to hold a seat than to protect our children; the virtual handing over of oversight of entire segments of the economy to K Street lobbyists, and the resulting Abrahmoff/Ney/Cunningham scandals; the blatant manipulation of 9/11; Katrina; Iraq.
And you suggest that it all comes down to "the loss of numerous close races" or, in other words, all politcs is local. That axiom fell by the wayside this year. Or, perhaps you could say that Howard Dean's 50-state strategy took the local nature of the campaign and coordinated it on a national scale. Combine that with the enormous democratic GOTV machine, Moveon.org plus all of the bloggers, and some help from some unlikely sources, and you do have a tidal wave that crashed on the east coast and trickled down all the way to Tracy, California, where we got rid of Congressman "Eco-disaster" Pombo.
Thank you Rush Limbaugh.
And a special tip-of-the-hat to the president for waiting to fire Rumsfeld until after the election, and doing it the morning after to steal the democrats' thunder... without realizing that the enemy would see the firing as an admission of loss in Iraq. Bush can't even get this right.
So, what is John Murtha going to do as majority leader? He's going to execute on the plan to withdraw forces from Iraq, redeploy them in the region to keep an eye on Iraq and keep Iraq out of Iran's hands, and actually put Iraq ont he path to real democracy by making them stand on their own two feet (instead of using it as an excuse to make the likes of Halliburton, Blackwater and Titan record profits).
With Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, they'll be held accountable for their policy decisions.
This will be the major difference between the democrats and the republiCONs, who have not been accountable for anything to anyone.
And we all see where that got us.
Comment 2 by John Teague at 03-Dec-06 12:04 AM
After all the trash talking you've been doing about Murtha, I wonder how you will respond now that the 'secret' memo Rumsfeld wrote to Bush, which contained the same assessment and many of Murtha's recommendations from 2005, is out in the open?
Clearly, Murtha knew that Bush's policies on Iraq were a pipe dream long before Rumsfeld. Let the spin begin. . . .
