Democrats screw America

I’ve often said that the US elections last November made very little real difference to America because Congress still had a conservative majority as it has for at least a generation. The proof of that came today when the US Congress caved-in to Bush and passed a bill to spend extra money on Bush’s Iraq War—no timelines for withdrawal of US troops, no enforceable “benchmarks” that the so-called government in Iraq would have to live up to (since Bush is empowered to ignore benchmarks if he so wishes), absolutely nothing that will in any way bring an end to this disaster. Instead, Bush gets what he demanded all along. It’s a complete victory for him.

In the end, the whole thing amounted to exactly what the Republicans said it was: Political grandstanding. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “The debate will go on.” Yeah, you tell them, Nancy! The Bushies will be quaking in their boots in fear of your fury. And, the Republicans haven’t changed since the election, either:

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio choked back tears as he stirred memories of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to take them on? When are we going to defeat them,” he asked.

It’s the same tired rhetoric that the GOP has been peddling for years, lying that the war in Iraq is in some way related to the “war on terror”. That’s the same GOP, of course, that blocked implementation of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, leaving America vulnerable to attack while they “choke back tears”. Give me a break.

Among Democratic Presidential candidates in the Senate, only Christopher Dodd pledged in advance to vote against the bill. Joe Biden said he’d vote for it. At the roll call, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted no.

So why single-out Democrats? Because they promised things would be different. Republicans got America into this disaster, with Democratic support, of course, and they never said they’d change anything. So, I never expected anything of Republicans. In fact, Republicans won’t change unless the threat of losing their re-election bid forces them to.

Among Democrats, only Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came even close to setting the right tone:

Senate Democrats will not stop our efforts to change the course of this war until either enough Republicans join with us to reject President Bush’s failed policy or we get a new president.

Those November elections clearly changed nothing. Despite polls showing that huge majorities of Americans oppose Bush’s war (including 80 percent of independents), absolutely nothing has been done to end it or to even exercise a teeny, tiny little bit of oversight—you know, as Congress is supposed to do.

It would seem that Emma Goldman was right: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal."