This diary is non-realistic, given the razor-sharp division in the Senate.
Particularly this comment is nonsense, amongst others:
Hillary Clinton, who argues that the war won't end until the next President takes office and so she won't take a public position that Congress should use their financial leverage to end the war.
Looks like bunk to me. Here is a report from just today:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070218/ap_on_el_pr/iraq2008
In New Hampshire, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., told voters that the nonbinding resolution amounts to a vote of no confidence in Bush and his policy.
"This is the beginning," Clinton, a front-runner for the Democratic nomination, said before rushing back to Capitol Hill.
She said it was important to get GOP senators on record objecting to the policy "in order to have them as possibly the core of Republicans who will stand with us to cap troops or cut funding." ... Two Democratic candidates not in Congress -- John Edwards, the former one-term senator from North Carolina, and Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor -- have demanded that Congress take stronger action by cutting off money for U.S. troops. Vilsack proposes cutting all funding for the war, while Edwards says funding should be cut for Bush's troop increase and the force capped at 100,000.
In Dover, N.H., Clinton argued before the vote that such calls fail to acknowledge the legislative reality that Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate.
"I understand the politics of this. I could very easily stand up here and say, 'I'm all for cutting off funding,' knowing we don't have the votes," Clinton said. "We have to end this war and we can't do it without Republican votes."
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So, let's get this straight: HRC said that the resolution today was important as a vote of no-confidence for Bush. Then she claimed that it was only a beginning, but was an important element to get everybody on record, including Republicans, and start working on a core of Republicans who will "stand with us to cap troops or cut funding."
The reality of what is actually being said stands in stark contrast to what the writer of this diary claims. At the very least he is being unrealistic.
Her remarks are also on the money about those who "demand" immediate funding cuts while failing to convey, either ignorantly or with full knowledge of the real facts, the reality as it exists in the Senate today. For that matter, the writer of this diary does the same thing. We don't HAVE the 60 votes in the Senate. Sad, but true. Bashing any of the Senators for talking about the realism of that fact (and trying to find other means of stifling the surge which go beyond simple symbolism) is probably popular here, but not very helpful to get something accomplished.
I think the point, George, is that Hillary, with her widely publicised comments recently, has given the electorate the perception that the war will continue until the end of the Bush presidency. And while she has voted for this non-binding resolution and is now paying lip-service to it in her statements to the media she has not, to my knowledge, come out in favour of defunding, deauthorisation or a mandated withdrawal. In fact from your own quotations she is ducking these very issues.
Given her position as front-running Democratic presidential candidate, perceived as speaking for much of the party, this is not what you might call support for more binding measures. What is the public supposed to assume, then?
She does no such thing. In fact, I am reading these statements and they tell me that she is working on the opposite of what you claim.
The Senate is not in our favor. That is reality. Anyone who hollers that they "must" cut funding is either in denial, totally ignorant, or offers only lip service, knowing full well that there is no reality attached to these demands. It is in fact BS. The non-binding resolution did not even get the 60 votes needed in the Senate to advance. The NON-BINDING resolution.
I agree with HRC that folks like Edwards and Vilsack are merely playing politics with those demands. In the real world solutions have to be found to inch closer to a solution that at least 10 or so of the Republicans can live with to provide a meaningful solution, not empty rhetoric that does nothing but appease the wingers.
I just saw her video on this. Gee, I wish she would put that stuff in print so I just didn't have to watch her, shudder. Fair enough, but that's all new, isn't it. Up to now the only legislation she's discussed is a 10 January level cap. We shall see, up 'till now she hasn't given us much to work with, as I said.
I am not impressed with the non-binding bill, incidentally, and don't think defunding is a great idea, either. I am glad she has avoided that, as Obama has; in fact her bill sounds alot like his Iraq De-escalation Act of 2007, really, with drawdowns, commitments from the Iraqi government and so forth.
Whenever I read a comment that includes "the real world," I think of Martin Luther King and Ghandi.
Both realised that there was change of consciousness just beneath the surface of the real world each of them lived in.
So they acted in defiance of the "real world," eventually paying for it with their lives. They, however, changed the real world.
The same is happening in America today. The people voted for change, they didn't vote for Democrats they voted against Bush. Weakness, excuses for inaction doesn't impress American voters....and political junkies aren't typical of the voters.
Arguments that support the status quo which is what I'm reading here will go nowhere. Facts aren't the whole picture, interpretation of facts needs to be considered.
Facts con't constitute the real human world, if they did, we wouldn't be in Iraq today and we wouldn't be losing in Afghanistan.
Non binding resolutions will not influence a madman like our President.
And this debate doesn't impress John Q Public.
she has not, to my knowledge, come out in favour of defunding, deauthorisation or a mandated withdrawal.
Clinton emphasizes her support for a phased redeployment of American troops from Iraq and said that if the redeployment doesn't begin within 90 days Congress should revoke authorization for the war.
WP's The Fix
To be looked over soon..!
Fair enough, hadn't realised she had made this announcement.
She's claiming that she was "misled" by Bush on the war and that's why she voted for it. Ignoring for the moment that there were 23 other Senators who were equally misled and still voted against it, let's give her the benefit of the doubt and grant that maybe she did, in fact, fall victim to bad information and a misguided sense of trust in Bush.
So why isn't Hillary calling for tough, thorough, aggressive investigations of the runup to the war? She's in the Senate. She can do that. But she certainly doesn't sound all that upset that she was "misled". I would think that being "misled" in the defining issue of the decade would elicit at least SOME kind of outrage, and a strong desire to get at the root of the deceptions. And yet she's strangely uninterested in finding out.
And that, in essence, is why I don't believe her when she says she now opposes the war. As it is with everything in her political career, it's all about calculation and triangulation, and appeasing her warmongering funding sources. And when Americans keep on dying because her career is more important than their lives, maybe it's time to put an end to her career and replace her with someone who cares about the country.
