Democrats cater to the antiwar crowd
No one will dispute the fact that we have our fair share of antiwar critics in America. That is the beauty of the First Amendment; we all have the ability to criticize or praise the government for their actions. The problem is, as The Politico notes today, that the antiwar crowds are demanding more attention than what they're really worth. But it's not stopping the Democrats from carrying out their business-as-usual antics in Congress:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) abruptly reversed plans to compromise over Iraq legislation with Republicans after a meeting in New York where antiwar leaders pressured him to be more aggressive in ending the war.
The meeting on Monday, which was not publicly announced, showed the acute pressure that Democrats face as they try to convince this increasingly restive group that Democrats are doing everything they can to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq more quickly than President Bush wants.
Less than a day after Reid met with several leaders of the antiwar movement in New York, he and other Democratic leaders took a hard line against wooing wavering Republicans to their anti-war cause. “We haven’t found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president,” Reid said Tuesday.
I wonder why? Might it have something to do with the recent reports from Petraeus and Crocker? Could it possibly be because the GOP is starting to see us turning a corner in Iraq? I'm guessing that has a lot to do with the lack of round-heeled Republicans in the Senate which is simply frustrating the Hell out of Harry Reid and his nutter caucus. (By the way, you're welcome Harry; happy to help that ulcer along.) But we have many critics of our own that e-mail us reminding us about the fact that the antiwar movement is alive and well. Well, Ryan Grim addresses that very point in his piece:
The Reid mission reflected the paradox bedeviling the anti-war movement. It is powerful enough to command constant care-and-feeding by the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates and congressional leaders. But so far it has proven largely impotent in forcing policy changes. But Democrats are now starting to do more than just patronize the movement, as Reid indicated Tuesday.
If Reid stands firm to his Tuesday pledge, he may begin to satisfy an increasingly impatient anti-war movement. Five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush's march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.
What’s more, five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush’s march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.
Lesson #1 for the Left -- AMERICANS, as George S. Patton once quipped, love to win and hate to lose. The nation still stands behind her men and women fighting abroad to protect this nation, and until the job is done that resolve won't break. Families don't like seeing and knowing their loved ones are in harm's way. No one likes to know that. War is a dirty, bloody business but this step had to be done, sooner or later.
Impatience rising, some activists are urging that Democrats who are not aggressive enough in confronting Bush on Iraq themselves be challenged with primary opponents or third-party candidacies in 2008.
Lesson from the fever-swamp Left -- "We bought this party and we own it," was the famous quip from 2004, and they're doing everything they can to seize power and change direction of the party. What the elected Democrats realize is that these activists don't represent the majority of their base, and they are beholden to that base. They're going to try and force the Democrats to obey them by threatening primary challengers that fit their ideology better. What they fail to realize is that if their agenda was supposed to have been foolproof for the midterms , then those of like mind should have won. they didn't. the Blue Dogs tried that route and were roundly getting stomped in the run-up to the general election. So, the Blue Dogs took the message of moderation, and coupled it with a dash of conservatism. They rode that platform to victory, and it wasn't one of fever-swamp nuttiness.
“People are feeling like we invested all this time and money in changing the political equation and where has it led us?” said former congressman Tom Andrews, leader of Win Without War, a member of the anti-war coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI).
Polls show majorities agree with anti-war leaders that the war was a mistake and that troops should come home soon.
But unlike during the Vietnam era, when the size and strength of street protests gradually grew over time, the Iraq war initially produced massive demonstrations that have since petered out. On Saturday, only about 20,000 gathered for what was billed a major peace march.
Despite millions spent and a season of action dubbed “Iraq Summer,” September arrived without the dam breaking Bush’s Republican support for a continued indefinite presence in Iraq.
Polls schmolls; they really do mean next to nothing. They're a nice barometer, but when they're all driven and carried out by the MSM, can they really be trusted? No. Do a search on Hot Air's archives and look at the amount of polls they disseminated this past summer. You'll see poll after poll is slanted and manipulated to produce an outcome that shows people are divided on the war. Well, no kidding. There will always be those that prefer detente and diplomacy to armed conflict. that's been going on for centuries. But the point is made by Mr. Grim that this is an entirely different war, given the lack of those on the antiwar activist side. What the Left fails to grasp is that they brought this antiwar apathy on themselves.
At the end of the Vietnam conflict this nation was polarized over the war. Activists had acted like no one had ever seen before. They had conducted violent protests, denouncing the soldiers and their commanders, and lambasted the politicos that had led the nation to war. Soldiers were demeaned, spit upon, and slandered -- at times by their own brothers in arms. In short and not to be too blunt, but when our troops returned home, they were treated like sh*t. While antiwar activists patted themselves on the back, America made a silent, solemn vow that "never again" would our soldiers ever be treated in such a dishonorable fashion.
That’s not how it was supposed to go.
Last April, an energized Tom Matzzie, head of AAEI, visited the offices of Politico to lay out the summer strategy — and the 2008 elections were central to his thinking.
Democrats and the anti-war movement had the GOP “by the balls,” Matzzie argued then, because the party’s conservative base still heavily supported the war, while the rest of the country opposed it.
Republicans would therefore be forced to choose between the president and their base, and the general electorate. If the GOP prevented anti-war legislation from passing this term, he said, a colorful fate awaited it.
“We’re going to smash their heads against their base and flush them down the toilet,” Matzzie said in April. Five months later, the GOP is still unified behind the war.
This is now the face of the modern antiwar movement. They're not interested in debating whether the war was right or wrong. they're angry. they're militant. and tempered with a child's maturity, these people are spitting not only on the soldiers, but they're also spitting on the nation for backing the war. for them, 11 September was rightly deserved. Yes, yes, make no mistake they think we deserved it. They think we invited it. Unfortunately for them, history tells a much different tale about the rise of militant Islam and it's not a pretty picture.
This is the foe we are dealing with. Harry Reid can appeal to the fever swamp if he wants to, but I warn him that this is not the way to go if they want to hold onto the control they have. The mainstream Democrat base won't tolerate their elected reps and leaders catering to these moonbats. It turns them off as much as the moonbats in our own party turn off our base.
The antiwar movement in America is losing the battle, and they know it. I predict that before they go away or shouted into silence by sensible people that their antics and rhetoric will rise. But when they hold their next "big" demonstration, they'll be just as disappointed as they were at the end of this past weekend.
Publius II
ADDENDUM: This wasn't the only piece on the antiwar movement at Politico today. Dan Gerstain has a piece about who should bear the brunt of the blame for the failures of the antiwar crowd. In short, it's the movement's fault for simply attacking the president, the Congress, the plans from the Pentagon, and General Petraeus. Their failure lies in not being able to persuade enough people to see their view of the situation in Iraq (which is twisted to begin with). Here's a snippet:
To most war opponents, the blame increasingly lies with the Democratic leadership in Congress, for not taking a hard enough line with President Bush and not fighting to cut off war funding. And their frustration is visibly bubbling over — the provocative group Code Pink, for example, has actually taken to protesting outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in recent days.
But there is a growing feeling among many Democrats, particularly within the D.C. establishment, that just the opposite is true. They may not say it publicly, for fear of arousing the grass roots’ wrath, but the realist wing of the party seems to think the Democrats’ biggest problem on Iraq these days is not that there’s too much Bush Lite but that there’s too much Bush Left.
Under this view, too many anti-war activists, not satisfied with berating the president, have too often wound up behaving like him. They have gone beyond fighting back and holding the Decider accountable to adopting the same divisive, dogmatic and ultimately destructive style of politics that Democrats have been decrying for the past seven years, with the same counterproductive results.
Read it all.
Publius II
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) abruptly reversed plans to compromise over Iraq legislation with Republicans after a meeting in New York where antiwar leaders pressured him to be more aggressive in ending the war.
The meeting on Monday, which was not publicly announced, showed the acute pressure that Democrats face as they try to convince this increasingly restive group that Democrats are doing everything they can to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq more quickly than President Bush wants.
Less than a day after Reid met with several leaders of the antiwar movement in New York, he and other Democratic leaders took a hard line against wooing wavering Republicans to their anti-war cause. “We haven’t found much movement with the Republicans. They seem to be sticking with the president,” Reid said Tuesday.
I wonder why? Might it have something to do with the recent reports from Petraeus and Crocker? Could it possibly be because the GOP is starting to see us turning a corner in Iraq? I'm guessing that has a lot to do with the lack of round-heeled Republicans in the Senate which is simply frustrating the Hell out of Harry Reid and his nutter caucus. (By the way, you're welcome Harry; happy to help that ulcer along.) But we have many critics of our own that e-mail us reminding us about the fact that the antiwar movement is alive and well. Well, Ryan Grim addresses that very point in his piece:
The Reid mission reflected the paradox bedeviling the anti-war movement. It is powerful enough to command constant care-and-feeding by the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates and congressional leaders. But so far it has proven largely impotent in forcing policy changes. But Democrats are now starting to do more than just patronize the movement, as Reid indicated Tuesday.
If Reid stands firm to his Tuesday pledge, he may begin to satisfy an increasingly impatient anti-war movement. Five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush's march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.
What’s more, five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush’s march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.
Lesson #1 for the Left -- AMERICANS, as George S. Patton once quipped, love to win and hate to lose. The nation still stands behind her men and women fighting abroad to protect this nation, and until the job is done that resolve won't break. Families don't like seeing and knowing their loved ones are in harm's way. No one likes to know that. War is a dirty, bloody business but this step had to be done, sooner or later.
Impatience rising, some activists are urging that Democrats who are not aggressive enough in confronting Bush on Iraq themselves be challenged with primary opponents or third-party candidacies in 2008.
Lesson from the fever-swamp Left -- "We bought this party and we own it," was the famous quip from 2004, and they're doing everything they can to seize power and change direction of the party. What the elected Democrats realize is that these activists don't represent the majority of their base, and they are beholden to that base. They're going to try and force the Democrats to obey them by threatening primary challengers that fit their ideology better. What they fail to realize is that if their agenda was supposed to have been foolproof for the midterms , then those of like mind should have won. they didn't. the Blue Dogs tried that route and were roundly getting stomped in the run-up to the general election. So, the Blue Dogs took the message of moderation, and coupled it with a dash of conservatism. They rode that platform to victory, and it wasn't one of fever-swamp nuttiness.
“People are feeling like we invested all this time and money in changing the political equation and where has it led us?” said former congressman Tom Andrews, leader of Win Without War, a member of the anti-war coalition Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI).
Polls show majorities agree with anti-war leaders that the war was a mistake and that troops should come home soon.
But unlike during the Vietnam era, when the size and strength of street protests gradually grew over time, the Iraq war initially produced massive demonstrations that have since petered out. On Saturday, only about 20,000 gathered for what was billed a major peace march.
Despite millions spent and a season of action dubbed “Iraq Summer,” September arrived without the dam breaking Bush’s Republican support for a continued indefinite presence in Iraq.
Polls schmolls; they really do mean next to nothing. They're a nice barometer, but when they're all driven and carried out by the MSM, can they really be trusted? No. Do a search on Hot Air's archives and look at the amount of polls they disseminated this past summer. You'll see poll after poll is slanted and manipulated to produce an outcome that shows people are divided on the war. Well, no kidding. There will always be those that prefer detente and diplomacy to armed conflict. that's been going on for centuries. But the point is made by Mr. Grim that this is an entirely different war, given the lack of those on the antiwar activist side. What the Left fails to grasp is that they brought this antiwar apathy on themselves.
At the end of the Vietnam conflict this nation was polarized over the war. Activists had acted like no one had ever seen before. They had conducted violent protests, denouncing the soldiers and their commanders, and lambasted the politicos that had led the nation to war. Soldiers were demeaned, spit upon, and slandered -- at times by their own brothers in arms. In short and not to be too blunt, but when our troops returned home, they were treated like sh*t. While antiwar activists patted themselves on the back, America made a silent, solemn vow that "never again" would our soldiers ever be treated in such a dishonorable fashion.
That’s not how it was supposed to go.
Last April, an energized Tom Matzzie, head of AAEI, visited the offices of Politico to lay out the summer strategy — and the 2008 elections were central to his thinking.
Democrats and the anti-war movement had the GOP “by the balls,” Matzzie argued then, because the party’s conservative base still heavily supported the war, while the rest of the country opposed it.
Republicans would therefore be forced to choose between the president and their base, and the general electorate. If the GOP prevented anti-war legislation from passing this term, he said, a colorful fate awaited it.
“We’re going to smash their heads against their base and flush them down the toilet,” Matzzie said in April. Five months later, the GOP is still unified behind the war.
This is now the face of the modern antiwar movement. They're not interested in debating whether the war was right or wrong. they're angry. they're militant. and tempered with a child's maturity, these people are spitting not only on the soldiers, but they're also spitting on the nation for backing the war. for them, 11 September was rightly deserved. Yes, yes, make no mistake they think we deserved it. They think we invited it. Unfortunately for them, history tells a much different tale about the rise of militant Islam and it's not a pretty picture.
This is the foe we are dealing with. Harry Reid can appeal to the fever swamp if he wants to, but I warn him that this is not the way to go if they want to hold onto the control they have. The mainstream Democrat base won't tolerate their elected reps and leaders catering to these moonbats. It turns them off as much as the moonbats in our own party turn off our base.
The antiwar movement in America is losing the battle, and they know it. I predict that before they go away or shouted into silence by sensible people that their antics and rhetoric will rise. But when they hold their next "big" demonstration, they'll be just as disappointed as they were at the end of this past weekend.
Publius II
ADDENDUM: This wasn't the only piece on the antiwar movement at Politico today. Dan Gerstain has a piece about who should bear the brunt of the blame for the failures of the antiwar crowd. In short, it's the movement's fault for simply attacking the president, the Congress, the plans from the Pentagon, and General Petraeus. Their failure lies in not being able to persuade enough people to see their view of the situation in Iraq (which is twisted to begin with). Here's a snippet:
To most war opponents, the blame increasingly lies with the Democratic leadership in Congress, for not taking a hard enough line with President Bush and not fighting to cut off war funding. And their frustration is visibly bubbling over — the provocative group Code Pink, for example, has actually taken to protesting outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco in recent days.
But there is a growing feeling among many Democrats, particularly within the D.C. establishment, that just the opposite is true. They may not say it publicly, for fear of arousing the grass roots’ wrath, but the realist wing of the party seems to think the Democrats’ biggest problem on Iraq these days is not that there’s too much Bush Lite but that there’s too much Bush Left.
Under this view, too many anti-war activists, not satisfied with berating the president, have too often wound up behaving like him. They have gone beyond fighting back and holding the Decider accountable to adopting the same divisive, dogmatic and ultimately destructive style of politics that Democrats have been decrying for the past seven years, with the same counterproductive results.
Read it all.
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 3:18 PM
1 Comments:
I'm sorry you are ailing. I hope it's temporary. Hugh Hewitt had a piece on Columbia and the open collar little Hitler. I agree he should not be allowed anywhere near the campus. As I recall, Columbia banned the ROTC. Rawriter
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