Get a Grip

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I haven’t commented on either the recent O.J. Simpson or Michael Richards news stories because they’re outside the purview of this blog, but this column by Erin Aubry Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times is too stupid to be real. Kaplan compares the two news stories and argues they prove that Americans are more tolerant of a white man’s misbehavior than of a black man’s. No, really; I am not exaggerating. Sample paragraph:

I’m not equating racist invective with charges of double homicide. But the reality is that there is far more tolerance for a white person’s unseemly behavior than for similar behavior of somebody who isn’t white, especially if the unseemliness involves race. Richards’ “racist rant” has been described as a terrible but isolated incident. O.J., meanwhile, is condemned for his character.

I think committing a double homicide does speak poorly for one’s character, but that’s me. I haven’t been paying close enough attention to the Richards episode to have noticed anyone defending his character — I assume some of his friends have — but it’s obvious that in the court of public opinion Richards’s character has been found wanting.

I’m looking at the reaction to Richards’s rant, and I’m not seeing tolerance. I’m seeing shock and revulsion.

The truth is that Richards’s career, such as it was, is most likely over now. He can probably get gigs in dinner theater in the redneck circuit, but that’s it. I’ll be very surprised if he’s ever again booked into respectable venues in urban areas. I’m sure he gets some income from the perpetual syndication of the old Seinfeld series, but Richards’s outburst might even take the shine off that. (And hasn’t everyone who actually liked that series seen all the episodes three times already?)

I agree with Eugene Robinson when he says that recent episodes — Richards’s rant; the George Allen “macaca” moment — reveal a strong undercurrent of racism in America.

… as a society, we still haven’t purged ourselves of racial prejudices and animosities. We’ve buried them under layers of sincere enlightenment and insincere political correctness, but they’re still down there, eating at our souls.

Yes, but it’s also true that a big, multiracial cross-section of America were genuinely disgusted by both episodes, and both men are paying a price. Forty years ago these tirades wouldn’t even have been news; the nation has not been purged of racism, but it has largely repented of it, and that’s progress. And I’m more than a little disturbed when the actions of one individual — well, OK, two — are held up as being representative of the entire white population of North America. Particularly when much of said population expressed disapproval.

Richards’s behavior has caused him to be in the contemporary equivalent of the pillory. The whole country is throwing virtual rotten tomatoes at his exposed, racist head. And yes, a lot of those throwing tomatoes are just as guilty as he is. But a lot of us are really, truly sickened by what he did.

Good for Her

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Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press reports:

Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.

It was the first time that Reno, attorney general in the Clinton administration, has spoken out against the administration’s policies on terrorism detainees, underscoring how contentious the court fight over the nation’s new military commissions law has become. Former attorneys general rarely file court papers challenging administration policy.

So far the righties have been fairly subdued, but one commenter to a rightie site couldn’t resist a walk down memory lane. He writes:

I am always amused by those on the Left crying about the Constitution.

1. Does anybody remember Ruby Ridge and a dead child and woman there?
2. Does anybody remember Waco – Branch Davidians and women and children killed there?
3. Does anybody remember Elian Gonzales being forcibly sent back to Communist Cuba?

It appears all children are at risk whenever Janet Reno is involved with any issue and she seems the forget about the Constitution herself from time to time!

How come these meatballs never remember that Ruby Ridge occurred during the George H.W. Bush Administration (August 1992)? Or that the investigation conducted by former Republican Senator Jack Danforth concluded the Branch Davidians shot their children and then each other?

I’m not sure that Elian Gonzalez’s issue was a constitutional one, as Gonzalez was a foreign national, but he wasn’t sent back “forcibly.” He was (willingly) returned to the custody of his father, who had plenty of opportunity to request asylum from Cuba, and did not. “Forcible” would have been taking him away from his father and making him stay.

Details, details.

And does anyone remember that the new RNC chair, Sen. Mel Martinez, made his bones with the GOP by attacking Janet Reno during in the Gonzalez Saga? You can read about it at Media Matters.

Sloppy Reporting in the New York Times?

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Anne Kornblut’s New York Times story on Senator Clinton’s 2006 campaign expenditures claims the Senator “blew” $30 million on her re-election campaign against a nominal opponent. Apparently the cable television bobbleheads are all over this story now, tossing out claims that the Senator’s campaign staff had predicted she’d have $50 million left over from the Senate campaign, when in fact she has $14 million. And Kornblut has been warbling about how much money the Senator’s campaign spent at Staples.

Per an email from Peter Daou:.

He says he does not believe anyone in the Clinton campaign had predicted ending the campaign with a $50 million warchest, or even a $20-30 million warchest.

As was mentioned several paragraphs into the article, part of the campaign money went toward building a massive list of small donor supporters around the country. One assumes this was in anticipation of a presidential campaign, although the Senator has not yet declared being a presidential candidate.

Kornbult’s article doesn’t mention the more than $2.5 million the Senator contributed to the DSCC and DCCC.

Expenditures Kornblut calls “consultant fees” went into advertising production, direct mail, polling, targeting, and phone calls.

On the other hand, David Sirota says some of that money could have been spent on other Senate and House races, which is a good point (although Senator Clinton did give more than $2.5 million to the DSCC and DCCC).

But my question is, why is this a story? For any reason other than, it’s Tuesday, so it’s time to smear Hillary! And will Chris Matthews obsess about it all through Hardball, which is about to start (please, no).

Happy Day

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Some good news this morning — the Houston janitor strike is over, and the janitors won. And the Dem party rose up and smacked down the forces of darkness (James Carville) who wanted to oust Howard Dean as DNC chair. Chris Bowers writes that even the Clintonistas sided with Dean. Apparently they didn’t want a backlash from the activist wing of the party.

Note that just a couple of years ago, they wouldn’t have given a thought to a backlash from the activist wing of the party. This is called “progress.” Remember that word; going forward, we may be using it a lot.

Chris writes (emphasis added),

Howard Dean’s base of support in the party has come primarily from two sources: state parties and the progressive movement. Although lacking in nuance, it would not be inaccurate to characterize the current modus operandi of the DNC as follows: small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville’s base of supporters hate Dean so much.

It would be premature now, but someday I hope to write a post about all the people who whined that the Democrats would never change — and how they were wrong.

Although this is obviously lost on most pundits and journalists, it is interesting how this seemingly odd alliance between state parties and the progressive movement is based not upon ideology. Rather, it is based upon both a shared strategic principle, the fifty-state strategy, and a shared chip on the shoulder: the sense that both have been long ignored by the party leadership. It is a sort of Alliance of the Ignored. When this alliance runs afoul of the Carville’s and Begala’s of the world, once gain it does so primarily because of strategic differences, not because of ideology. Carville and Begala generally represent an older tactical vision for the Democratic Party. This was a vision that was dominant from 1988-2004, when Democrats heavily employed triangulation, focused almost entirely on the narrow targeting of a few “swing” districts and demographics, and when television advertisements ad repetitious talking points aimed mushy-middle, low information voters where the primary tools utilized in all national Democratic campaigns. Wealthy donors and high-level consultants liked that strategy because it kept money flowing to the latter in the form of hefty commissions, and because it kept Democratic policy where the former would like it to be. Most state parties and progressive activists hated that strategy because it basically dictated that their electoral concerns were either not important, or something that the Democratic Party needed to actively distance itself from. Whatever ideological differences there may or may not be between the two feuding camps, ultimately their dispute is grounded in a difference in tactical vision: narrow targeting versus the fifty-state strategy.

If you want to extract somebody helplessly stuck in a rut, you can either haul them out forcibly or you can change the rut. I’ve been arguing for months now that the problem with Democrats isn’t (necessarily) the individual Democrats (there are exceptions), but the political cultures of Washington DC and the nation. And I’ve been arguing that even if you could rustle up a third party of honest progressive candidates and got them elected, unless the political culture of Washington changes they’d end up being just like the Dems.

Put another way, if the fish are sick because the water in the tank is foul, the solution is not to buy different fish (which will soon be just as sick) but to change the water. You might end up replacing some fish too, of course, but with new water some of the old fish might perk up and be just fine. Or maybe not. The reality is that we’re going to have to put up with some stinky old fish (Joe Lieberman; Joe Biden) for a while yet. There is still work to be done.

William Greider writes in The Nation (emphasis added),

Republicans lost, but their ideological assumptions are deeply embedded in government, the economy and the social order. Many Democrats have internalized those assumptions, others are afraid to challenge them. It will take years, under the best circumstances, for Democrats to recover nerve and principle and imagination–if they do.

But this is a promising new landscape. Citizens said they want change. Getting out of Iraq comes first, but economic reform is close behind: the deteriorating middle class, globalization and its damaging impact on jobs and wages, corporate excesses and social abuses, the corruption of politics. Democrats ran on these issues, and voters chose them.

The killer question: Do Democrats stick with comfortable Washington routines or make a new alliance with the people who just elected them? Progressives can play an influential role as ankle-biting enforcers. They then have to get up close and personal with Democrats. Explain that evasive, empty gestures won’t cut it anymore. Remind the party that it is vulnerable to similar retribution from voters as long as most Americans don’t have a clue about what Democrats stand for.

Conventional wisdom says that the only reason Dems won in the midterms is that Republicans lost. If you look at individual elections, that assumption doesn’t always hold water. These campaigns reveal a strong current of economic populism running through much of the country. Greider continues,

Both before and after the election, major media, led by the New York Times and Washington Post, repeatedly emphasized that no leftward ideological shift would occur, because Democrats are moving rightward. This was bogus, way too simplistic. It overlooked the fact that 100 or more candidates ran aggressively on liberal or populist economic issues–against unregulated free trade and the offshoring of American jobs, against special interests, corporate excesses and social abuses. The Blue Dog and New Democrat caucuses will expand, but the Progressive Caucus will, too, and will remain the largest–at seventy-one members.

The real contest among Washington Dems is not whether they will or will not impeach President Bush or how they will frame the abortion debate. It’s between the neoliberal “free traders” and the economic populists. Christopher Hayes writes,

At the national level, cable pundits almost immediately focused on a handful of winning Democrats with conservative stances on social issues–Jon Tester’s A rating from the NRA, Bob Casey’s opposition to choice and, obsessively, former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler, who defeated incumbent Charles Taylor in North Carolina’s 11th District while opposing abortion, gay rights and a guest-worker program for immigrants. But what the pundits didn’t mention was the role in Shuler’s victory of the district’s opposition to “free trade” deals. The area’s textile industry has been gutted by NAFTA, so when it came time to vote on CAFTA, Taylor was caught between his district, which wanted him to vote no, and the GOP House leadership, which wanted him to vote yes. So he skipped the vote altogether and CAFTA passed by one vote.

During the campaign, Shuler hammered Taylor for “selling out American families,” and he wasn’t alone in using trade as a wedge issue. A postelection analysis by Public Citizen found that campaigns cut twenty-five ads attacking free-trade deals, and that trade played a significant role in more than a dozen House races won by Democrats. In the entire election, Public Citizen noted, “no incumbent fair trader was beaten by a ‘free trader.'”

If the Dems are going to build on this month’s victories two years from now, I think they’re going to have to show real leadership — not just rhetoric and empty gestures, but leadership that effects tangible change — in two areas. And those areas are Iraq (as in “getting out of”) and economic populism (as in taking on globalization and corporate power and promoting economic fairness). In the latter area there is only so much a party can accomplish in two years, but I think it’s important that voters see they’ve made a start.

And, yes, there’s taking on Bush. Investigations, yes. Hearings, by all means. Drag all the dirt out into the sunshine so the American people can see it. If it leads to impeachment, grand. I suspect the issues of “Iraq” and “confronting Bush” will turn out to be of a piece, anyway. But the Dems must not forget economic populism. They’d better respond to the voters, or find themselves sinking again.

Prediction

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So often when a Big Shot is caught doing something naughty, this news is followed by admissions from his friends and colleagues: “We knew Mr. Big Shot was [choose one or more: taking bribes, cheating on his wife, in the closet, addicted to painkillers, addicted to porn, soliciting minors, a giant bloodsucking worm] but we all hoped he would get over it before he harmed himself [i.e., got caught].”

After reading Wolcott (via Avedon), my prediction is that someday we’ll find out that so-called recovered alcoholic George W. Bush was drinking the whole time he was in the White House, and the White House staff and a big chunk of Republican leadership and some Democrats and half of the White House press corps knew about it, but were just hoping (for his sake, of course) that he’d straighten himself out before he got caught harmed himself.

Wanna bet?

Jealousy

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You know the VRWC is off the sexism chart when even Ann Althouse notices. But apparently the Right’s brilliant plan to “get Hillary” is to “get Nancy Pelosi.” Because, you know, one Democratic woman is just like another.

Hans Nichols and Philip Sherwell write in The Telegraph:

The Republican strategy is not only to undermine Mrs Pelosi’s control of the House but also to associate her in voters’ minds with Senator Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination.

“Two years of Pelosi gives a good idea of what four years of Hillary will be like,” said Tom DeLay, the Republican powerbroker who ran his party in the House before he was caught up in a lobbyist corruption scandal. “They are both committed liberals and we will make that clear to the American people.”…

…A senior Republican operative who planned the damaging advertisements against Sen John Kerry, the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2004, predicted that it would not be easy to turn Mrs Pelosi into a surrogate target for Mrs Clinton.

“If Hillary has been able to separate herself from criticisms of her own husband, she’ll try to do the same with Pelosi,” he said. “She and her people are very smart and they will try to highlight the difference between the two women. You will see Hillary move more to the centre.”

But a former strategist for a Republican House leader said: “If Pelosi comes across as not ready for prime time, that’s going to hamstring Hillary. Fair or not, people can’t help but make that comparison… Even Hillary’s people are recognising that their fates are linked.”

Oh, jebus, where to start …

First off, Republicans are acting like a loser ex-boyfriend who turns homicidal; the guy who thinks “If I can’t have her, no one will.” Apparently this isn’t just the stuff of TV serial drama. It’s a syndrome, called “male sexual proprietariness.”

It is manifested in the dogged inclination of men to control the activities of women, and in the male perspective according to which sexual access and woman’s reproductive capacity are commodities that mean can “own” and exchange. This proprietary point of view is furthermore inextricably bound up with the use of threat of violence in order to maintain sexual exclusivity and control. [page 259]

Substitute “government” for “women,” and I think you’ll see the point. Republicans are jealously stalking the Dems, shrieking “If we can’t govern, no one will!” After four years of complete control of Congress and the White House — four years of utter incompetence, please note — voters rejected them, and they can’t deal with it. They’ll foul up any attempts by Democrats to govern rather than accept the will of the voters. We should call this “wingnut governmental proprietariness.”

They were the same way after Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election. If you read David Brock’s Blinded by the Right, you’ll remember his descriptions of wingnut hysteria that Clinton was not “legitimate,” in spite of the fact that he had just won the bleeping election. Clearly, there are some aspects of republican government that wingnuts don’t grasp. The street sweepers were still cleaning up after the inauguration when the VRWC “punditocracy” were all over news media declaring that the Clinton Administration had already failed. Nothing the President did was too trivial for the wingnuts to blow up into a scandal. And as documented by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in The Hunting of the President, U.S. news media willingly allowed themselves to be tools for the VRWC cause.

The ever-alert Digby has documented symptoms of wingnut governmental proprietariness in news media for the past several days, albeit framed as the female equivalent of male sexual proprietariness — Queen Bee syndrome; see “Shrinking the Kewl Kids” and “Toxins.” Queen Bees are “mean girls” who control their friends and enhance their social power by social intimidation; see also Sara Robinson, “Kewl Kidz and Queen Bees.” As Digby says,

This kind of derisive babble is not simply a bunch of overgrown frat boys ‘n sorority girls disrespectfully talking about these women’s looks. It’s designed very specifically to trivialize them. It’s right out of the Spring 2000 Earth Tones catalogue.

And the Kewl Kidz, anxious as ever to prove their sophomoric Spite Girl bona-fides, are more than happy to “pass it on” …

The “pundits” already are picking Pelosi apart with comments about botox and designer suits. Her failure to get Jack Murtha elected Majority Whip is being blown up into “proof” that Pelosi will fail as a Speaker, in spite of the fact that she was elected unanimously. You know if something like this had gone on with Republicans ca. 1992, no one would have noticed. [Update: Michael Stickings reminds us that the same thing did happen when Newt G. was elected Speaker in 1994; see also Specious Reasoning.] Just as there has been little mention in media of the discontent over the election of John Boehner and Roy Blunt as House Minority Leader and Whip, a development that could prove to be more significant in the long run.

Back to the sexism angle — other than Althouse, rightie bloggers so far haven’t noticed their own biases in this matter. My favorite comment is at Macsmind:

Both Pelosi and Hillary have one distinct problem. Call it an identity crisis. That is that they – like most democrats – will not run for office on who they are – liberals. They are constantly trying to remake themselves appear “conservative” or if you will – republican. The problem with that is that they can do either because liberals cannot lead – except haphazardly, and they haven’t a clue about what conservatism is – therefore, they can screw up quite nicely on their own.

It’s all there, folks. Implicit sexism and explicit ideologism (liberals try to act like conservatives; think feminist women try to act like men). The dig about “liberals cannot lead,” which is a five-alarm hoot after the abject failure of movement conservatives (who had all the power) to lead. “They haven’t a clue about what conservatism is” — like this guy would recognize real liberalism if it bit his butt. Actually I doubt he knows what conservatism is, either, or at least what it used to be. The people running around calling themselves conservatives these days are mostly of the pseudo variety.

The wingnut definition of liberalism is, of course, is “whatever we want to diss.” The actual philosophical foundation of liberalism is irrelevant.

Likewise “women.” I think women are individual human beings, but when wingnuts think of women, they are thinking of something else entirely.

Fun With Numbers

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Let’s see if I can explain this in a way that even a wingnut can understand.

If you have ten apples and eat nine of them, don’t plan on baking a pie with what’s left. Your choices are to get more apples or do without the pie.

Let’s make it a little more complicated: If you start with two dozen place settings of china but break twice as many dishes as you replace, eventually you won’t have enough for a formal dinner party. Your choices are to replace the dishes or forget fine dining.

As math-impaired as I am, I figure that if I understand how subtraction works, anyone bright enough to use a fork ought to catch on. With that in mind, let’s look at a recent news story. Jerome L. Sherman wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

A solid majority of American soldiers returning from the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan say that U.S. armed forces are stretched too thin, according to a poll released yesterday by a veterans group.

VoteVets.org , a group headed by an Army reservist based near Pittsburgh, found that 63 percent of veterans of both conflicts describe the Army and Marine Corps as “overextended,” while many soldiers also complained about encountering emotional and physical problems when they came back from active duty.

“We hope that this poll is a wake-up call for Congress,” said Jon Soltz , who served in Iraq in 2003 and is now a captain with a reserve unit at the Charles E. Kelly Support Facility in Oakdale and chairman of VoteVets.

Let’s look at some old news stores. This is a report by Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News, March 9, 2004:

Today’s Army is under enormous stress. With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and dozens of other military missions worldwide, there are more than 320,000 Army troops alone deployed in 120 countries overseas. That’s more than 60 percent of the entire Army.

Former Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded U.S. troops in the first Gulf War, says the Army is being pushed to the breaking point. “We’re running these people ragged,” he said. “Many of them are being deployed three out of four years. They’re not going to stay.”

McClatchy Newspapers, November 1, 2006:

With the military stretched thin fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has lowered some academic recruitment standards and even granted waivers to permit the enlistment of people with criminal records that otherwise would disqualify them.


Jim Hoffer, WABC, November 2, 2006:

Last year, the Army fell short of its recruiting goals for the first time in years. While this year the Army is making its quota, it’s how they’re doing it that’s being called into question because of what we found undercover.

What he found was that recruiters are lying to the potential recruits, telling them there was little chance they’d go to Iraq. One recruiter told a student (secretly taping the conversation) that the war was over.

I bring this up because Rep. Charles Rangel, who in January will be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, plans to introduce a bill to reinstate the draft.

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded
Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” Rangel said.

Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War who has unsuccessfully sponsored legislation on conscription in the past, has said the all-volunteer military disproportionately puts the burden of war on minorities and lower-income families.

Steve Gilliard writes,

This is a way to call the GOP’s bluff.

Rangel has two recruiting stations in his district [which includes parts of Harlem and the Bronx], the neighboring ones have none. When you look at who gets killed in Iraq, no one from Dalton and the Upper East Side is included. But immigrants from Queens, firefighters, and a bunch of working people
are.

He knows it’s shitting the punch bowl, both for the GOP and liberal advocates of national service. People seem the draft is good for other people, but a draft of people 16-42 would take people older than the WW II draft, which ended at 36. Let’s see what they do when a bill is on the floor, vote it down of course. So we need to stop talking about wars as if we’re willing to fight them.

Righties — by definition, people who are too stupid to figure out that if you eat all the apples you can’t make the pie — are hootin’ about it.

But it’s only because of Mr. Rangel’s concern for the troops of course. It has nothing to do with trying to foment an anti-war movement like we had for Vietnam.

“Days Of Rage” here we come!

Say, where is the “Rock The Vote” crowd? Weren’t they and the rest of George Soros’ stooges spreading the lie that the Republicans intended to restore the draft if they won in 2004?

The “youth vote” turned out in record numbers on election day and apparently voted very heavily for the Democrats. (Remember, Rangel was going to retire if the Democrats didn’t win control of the House.)

Do you think they’ll ever notice they were lied to?

For a lot of reasons there won’t be an antiwar movement like the one during the Vietnam era. The biggest reason is that the antiwar movement is working online and within the political system this time, and not on the streets. And it’s not the young people who need to think about what they’re willing to sacrifice, but the politicians who support the war and are running the Army into the ground, yet lack the moral courage to make the hard choices between their wars and the draft.

I don’t know what “George Soros’ stooges” were saying in 2004, but this is what I was saying:

Jonathan Alter writes in Newsweek that the Bush Administration has no plans for a draft. “He knows that a draft would vaporize any remaining support for his Iraq policy,” Alter writes. “This would be of concern to him even as a second-term, lame-duck president. One thing we’ve learned about Bush is that he has never taken a position that he knew beforehand would be politically unpopular, including invading Iraq.”

One thing we know about Bush is that he’s all about winning elections. The governing thing is just a prop. And if he wins in November, why would he care what we think?

And another thing we know about Bush is that he’s not being honest about Iraq. His statements on Iraq are hallucinatory.

But I suspect Alter is right. Bush has no plans for a draft. Of course, he didn’t plan for escalating violence in Iraq, either. He didn’t plan for the car bombs that injured soldiers near Fallujah today, for example.

We can’t be sure what Bush is planning, or even if Bush is planning. There is speculation that he plans a major offensive at the end of the year to pacify the insurgents. Bob Novak says there are plans to cut and run after the January elections. Whatever. Clearly, Iraq is spinning out of his control.

So there’s no point asking if Bush has plans for a draft. The question is, what if he realizes he needs soldiers to actually defend America, and there aren’t enough to go around?

I had forgotten that the Reptile had predicted Bush would get out of Iraq after January 2005. Here’s the quote, from September 2004:

Inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying: Ready or not, here we go. …

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush’s decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

I guess the Reptile was wrong. Anyway, back in 2004 righties shoved their fingers into their ears and refused to listen to our warnings that, someday, somebody was going to have to make the tough decision between waging war without end and risking a political firestorm by reinstating the draft. And I personally didn’t think Bush would do it, because Bush is a moral weenie who lacks the courage to make decisions that he knows will hurt him politically.

Now, I don’t think the draft will be reinstated — yet — and I don’t want it to be reinstated. But the nation, and Congress, have to make the tough choice that the President won’t make — either end the war, or restart the draft. The obvious, sensible answer is end the war. Whichever way we go, however, the troops deserve an answer. They deserved an answer two years ago.

And do you think the wingnuts will ever notice they were lied to? I’m not holding my breath.