After the 2006 elections, voters expected that the Democratic majority in Congress would take actions that would change the course of the Iraq War. But this hasn’t happened, and the course of the Iraq War, regardless that Democrats control Congress, has continued pretty much as if the 2006 elections had never even happened at all.
What makes Democrats stuck in the Iraq War quagmire is fear. Democrats in Congress evidently feel that they must give Bush / Cheney everything they request as a means to support the Iraq War, because they fear that to do otherwise would open them to severe criticism. Democrats in Congress evidently think that the question, “Who lost Iraq?”, is likely to haunt political discourse for years to come.
But if Democrats in Congress feel they will get any credit, any thanks, from Bush cheerleaders for their long-suffering support of Bush’s Iraq War, they are fooling themselves. Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, explains the right wing political strategy concerning Iraq pretty clearly in his Tuesday’s column, “No News is Bad News For the Democrats,” printed in The Dayton Daily News. Thomas, in his column, is nearly salivating at the prospect of Republican vindication concerning the Iraq War. He says, “The evidence of improvement in Iraq is coming with greater frequency and credibility. A trickle of good news is becoming a stream.” He says that this is “very good news for Iraq and for America.” But, he says, it is very bad news for the leadership of the Democratic Party, because of its, “investment in defeat.” He quotes an editorial from The Weekly Standard that asks, “Are the American people likely to elect the candidate of a party that has tried its best to lose a winnable war?”
Thomas writes that since the Democratic Party is so vested in defeat, any good news from Iraq, to Democrats, is “the worst possible news, because it threatens to undermine the Democrats’ political objective: the defeat of Republicans in the next election, even at the cost of losing a war.”
So, there you have it, according to Thomas, any good news from Iraq is “the worst possible news” to Democrats. What a lot of B-O-L-O-G-N-A. Regardless that the Democratic Congress has completely capitulated to Bush’s demands concerning how to conduct the Iraq War, the right wing is determined to twist the truth, and willing to make the outrageous charge that Democrats actually want the US to experience massive failure in Iraq. This charge is very looney and very contrary to the facts. But such a charge is revealing because it helps explain why the Democratic Congress refuses to follow the mandate given to it by voters in the 2006 election. It’s all about fear.
The gall of Cal Thomas’s hateful column, his willingness to make outrageous and baseless condemnation, gives some insight into the fear that keeps the Democratic Congress firmly stuck in the Iraq quagmire.
