Why Congress caved to Bush

I don't like Patrick Buchanan very much. In fact I despise him, but the guy knows enough to call a spade a spade. Why did the Democrats in Congress stab their constituency in the back? Pat lays it out in no uncertain terms.

Why Congress caved to Bush

By Patrick J. Buchanan

05/25/07 "WorldNetDaily" -- -- The anti-war Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.

For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.

Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.

Yet, today, there are more U.S. troops in Iraq than when the Democrats won. More are on the way. And with the surge and retention of troops in Iraq beyond normal tours, there should be a record number of U.S. troops in country by year's end.

Why did the Democrats capitulate?

Because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they fear the consequences if they put their anti-war beliefs into practice. Because they are afraid if they defund the war and force President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops, the calamity he predicts will come to pass and they will be held accountable for losing Iraq and the strategic disaster that might well ensue.

Democrats are an intimidated party. The reasons are historical. They were shredded by Nixon and Joe McCarthy for FDR's surrenders to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, for losing China to Mao's hordes, for the "no-win war" in Korea, for being "soft on communism."

The best and the brightest – JFK's New Frontiersmen – were held responsible for plunging us into Vietnam and proving incapable of winning the war. A Democratic Congress cut off aid to Saigon in 1975, ceding Southeast Asia to Hanoi and bringing on the genocide of Pol Pot.

Democrats know they are distrusted on national security. They fear that if they defund this war and bring on a Saigon ending in the Green Zone, it will be a generation before they are trusted with national power. And power is what the party is all about.

Yet, not only does the situation in Iraq appear increasingly grim, with rising U.S. and Iraqi casualties, other shoes are about to drop that will reverberate throughout the region.

Support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his war in Lebanon a debacle and his leadership denounced by a commission he appointed, is in single digits. Waiting in the wings is Likud super-hawk "Bibi" Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, who compares today to Munich 1938 and equates Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

If and when Bibi comes to power, he will use every stratagem to provoke us into attacking "Hitler."

Also drumming for war on Iran are the floundering neocons and the Israeli lobby. Under orders from the lobby, Nancy Pelosi stripped from a House bill a stipulation that Bush must come to Congress for authorization before launching an attack on Iran.

With Democratic contenders reciting the mantra "All options are on the table," and Iran defying U.N. sanctions, pursuing nuclear enrichment and detaining U.S. citizens, Bush has a blank check to launch a third war.

Lebanon is ablaze. Gaza is ablaze. The Afghan war is not going well. The Taliban have a privileged sanctuary. The NATO allies grow weary.

In Pakistan, the most dangerous country on earth – one bullet away from an Islamic republic with atom bombs – our erstwhile ally, President Musharraf, is caught in a political crisis over his ouster of the chief justice.

Presidents Musharraf in Islamabad, Kharzi in Kabul and Siniora in Beirut, and Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, sit on shaky thrones. No one knows what follows their fall. But it is hard to see how it would not be crippling for America's position.

With such volatility in this crucial region of the world, with such uncertainty, it is easy to see why Democrats prefer to be the "dummy" at the bridge table and let Bush play the hand.

The congressional Democrats are cynical, but they are not stupid. If the surge works and U.S. troops are being withdrawn by fall 2008, they do not want it said of them that they "cut and ran" when the going got tough, that they played Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill.

And if the war is going badly in 2008, they know that the American people, in repudiating the party of Bush and Cheney, have no other choice than the party of Hillary and Pelosi and Harry Reid.

That is why congressional Democrats are surely saying privately of the angry anti-war left what has often been said by the Beltway Republican elite of the right: "Don't worry about them. They have nowhere else to go."

And that is why the anti-war left was thrown under the bus.

Copyright 1997-2007 - WorldNetDaily.com Inc.

current-events

You go with the veteran's health care system you got

Personally, I was shocked, shocked, I tell you, when I heard about Defense Secretary Gates' firing of Walter Reed Medical Center director Major General George Weightman. It is conceivable that the selection of Robert Gates as SecDef is the single solitary reasonable thing that Bush has ever done. God knows, Rummy would not (and didn't) fire the man responsible for such shoddy treatment of our "troops."

Of course, it took a "liberal" newspaper to bring the abysmal condition of our military's health system to the greater public's attention and start a serious attempt to do something about it. In other words, the liberal press kicked the administration's ass.

As a veteran who has been banged around in the VA system for the last several years, the appalling wait times, aftercare, and domicillary conditions rampant throughout the VA system aren't news to me, nor to the countless veterans that I have run into at various VA facilities in the last six years. Everybody who has ever been anywhere near a VA facility has a tale of woe. And I am not confusing the issue of Walter Reed Hospital with the Veteran's Administration, two separate entities.

The issue at hand, piss-poor aftercare, long wait-times for appointments, a visciously adversarial position on the part of even low-level beaurocrats who make life and death decisions on veterans' eligibility for disability benifits, etc, is prelevant across the board.

Increasing the misery is the fact that the veterans Admiistration is consistantly underfunded even in the face of ever higher mounting casualty numbers in the Middle East. While some sources have claimed that VA funding was increased by 77% under Bush, when you unpack that statement the numbers tell a different story. In the last six years, the VA's budget has increased due to funding for "benefits," survivors' benefits, construction, and disabilities insurance. Actual medical care funding only increased by 18%. The record is clear that while overall veterans assistance has increased in the last six years, the fact of the matter is that even these increases fail woefully to meet demand, and the administration's lying about the number of casualties doesn't help matters much.

From Bob Woodruff's recent ABC special on his experience with The System:

WOODRUFF: According to the Department of Defense, there have been about 23,000 nonfatal battlefield casualties, but that doesn’t tell the full story.

[…]

PAUL SULLIVAN, VETERANS ADVOCATE: These are the big numbers, Bob. 200,000 have already gone into VA for medical care.

WOODRUFF: The official number is that there are only about 23,000 soldiers and Marines who have been injured in this war.

SULLIVAN: What you have are two sets of books. The Department of Defense saying there are 23,000 wounded from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Department of Veterans Affairs is actually treating 205,000 veterans from these two wars.

[...]

WOODRUFF: You think Americans fully understand how many injured there are in this war?

NICHOLSON: I think it — I think it cuts both ways. I think Americans are always very surprised to know the number of amputations, for example, which is fewer than 600 in total. They’re probably also surprised to know that 200,000 come to the VA for some kind of medical treatment. That’s probably more than they think.

WOODRUFF: You have mental disorders — 73,000; diseases of nervous system — 61,000; symtpoms, signs of ill-defined conditions — 7,000; diseases of musculoskeletal system — 87,000. These are numbers beyond the 23,000.

NICHOLSON: A lot of them come in for dental problems, others come in for a lot of the normal things that people have. We’re providing their healthcare. Some I suppose are because of their service over there. But they weren’t evacuated for that.

WOODRUFF: But they got some kind of injury, some kind of problem because of the war.

NICHOLSON: That’s possible, yes.

Where did Bush find this asshole? The White House tells us:

Mr. Nicholson earned a master's degree from Columbia University in New York, and a law degree from the University of Denver. He practiced law in Denver, specializing in real estate, municipal finance and zoning law. In 1978 he founded Nicholson Enterprises, Inc., a developer of planned residential communities, and in 1987 he bought Renaissance Homes, which became an award-winning builder of quality custom homes.

In January 1986, Mr. Nicholson was elected committeeman from Colorado for the Republican National Committee (RNC). In 1993 he was elected vice-chairman of the RNC, and in January 1997, he was elected chairman of the RNC, where he served for four years, through the elections of 2000

Oh, I see - he sold houses and votes. Well, gee, that qualifies him to run the largest health care system in the world, doesn't it?

Anyway, Bush's latest budget calls for cutting funding of the VA for the next two years, even as war casualties mount. Shameless.

You call that a budget?

Hey you Republicans and you Libertarians, too! You wanna know why this country is headed into the ditch? Well, it's because assholes run the government, and the biggest asshole is George W Bush.

Why is Bush an asshole? Well, nobody really knows the answer to that cosmic queastion, but for a blazing example of his assholiness at work, look no further than his recent budget proposal, as analysied by Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone:

[A] guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation -- some of the world's evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D'Ivoire -- if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That's more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

Somehow, to me, that's the worst one on the list. Here you have the former CEO of a company that scored record profits even as it gouged consumers, with gas prices rising more than 70 percent since January of 2001. There is a direct correlation between the avarice of oil company executives and the increased demand for federal aid for heating oil programs like LIHEAP, and yet the federal government wants to reward these same executives for raising prices on the backs of consumers.

Even if you're a traditional, Barry Goldwater conservative, the kinds of budgets that Bush has sent to the hill not only this year but this whole century are the worst-case scenario; they increase spending generally while cutting taxes and social programming. They commit taxpayers to giant subsidies of already Croseus-rich energy corporations, pharmaceutical companies and defense manufacturers while simultaneously cutting taxes on those who most directly benefit from those subsidies. Thus you're not cutting spending -- you're just cutting spending on people who actually need the money. (According to the Washington Times, which in a supremely ironic twist of fate did one of the better analyses of the budget, spending will be 1.6 percent of GDP higher in the 2008 budget than in was in 2000, while revenues will be 2.6 percent of GDP lower). This is something different from traditional conservatism and something different from big-government liberalism; this is a new kind of politics that transforms the state into a huge, ever-expanding instrument for converting private savings into corporate profit.

That's not only bad government, it's bad capitalism. It makes legalized bribery and political connections more important factors than performance and competition in the corporate marketplace. Beyond that, it's just plain fucking offensive to ordinary people. It's one thing to complain about paying taxes when those taxes are buying a bag of groceries once a month for some struggling single mom in eastern Kentucky. But when your taxes are buying a yacht for some asshole who hires African eight year-olds to pick cocoa beans for two cents an hour ... I sure don't remember reading an excuse for that anywhere in the Federalist Papers.