Lowering The Costs Of Political Defeat
Saturday, November 4th, 2006If The War Against Terrah (TWAT), Iraq edition, was going as it was intended, we would be seeing and hearing all sorts of verifiable evidence to support those claims. But it’s not. Not even close.
Instead, any independent assessment of the situation in Iraq has been shut down, most recently the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. This committee, chaired by Republican lawyer Stuart Bowen, “is widely respected by Democrats and Republicans for the quality of its investigations and reports.”
We can’t have the public really know
what is really going on in Iraq,
now can we?
That’s why the staff of Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, inserted an operations deadline into a huge military authorization bill to limit the damage to that already revealed.
With the midterm election upon us, there isn’t time to do much about using Iraq as the reason voters should return a Republican Congress for more of the same except to attempt to turn the voter’s attention to the “booming” economy. Bush himself is exhorting us to notice “The tax cuts have led to a strong and growing economy” while Congressional Republicans campaigning for re-election make wild claims about a Democratic victory “jeopardizing prosperity”.
But this strategy is doomed to failure because
This Time, It’s Not the Economy.