Haiku Politics

Bono gets frustrated with the Democrats:

Meetings in Washington last Thursday between rock star Bono and Democrats, including Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada, yielded a nice photo-op but not much else, according to Bono.

Bono, the U2 frontman and anti-poverty activist, was on Capitol Hill to seek assurances that $1 billion in planned U.S. spending to fight AIDS and malaria in Africa would not be lost if Congress freezes agency budgets in the coming year.

Bono said he also was seeking to close a "commitment gap" between what President Bush has requested for anti-poverty efforts and what Congress has agreed to spend in the past.

After meetings with incoming Senate Majority Leader Reid, House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, Bono said he came away empty-handed.

"I'm alarmed we could not get a commitment from the Democratic leadership to prevent the loss of $1 billion in the continuing resolution," Bono said Thursday in a statement.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Iraq Study Group has published its report. Regardless of how Bush reacts to it, Helen Thomas has offered a refreshing perspective on the matter. As reported in the SFGate politics blog: "Helen Thomas complains that the report contains nothing critical of President Bush. She says it avoids addressing the fact that the United States invaded Iraq, destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands of people."

I say, thank God for Helen Thomas's refreshingly forthright characterization of the war. A mismanaged war is not the same as an immoral and illegal invasion. Blaming a President for mismanagement is not the same as identifying him as a war criminal who should never have gone to war in the first place.

And given that James Baker, who helped Bush steal the 2000 election, was co-chair of the commission, and centrist Democrat Lee Hamilton was the other co-chair, should any of this come as a surprise? The entire composition of the panel, with its "bipartisan" composition (as if there were only two opinions on any issue, with both opinions naturally coming from the different factions of the corporate ruling class), and chosen for its "centrist" ideology, it was doubtful that the critique would address the kinds of issues that Helen Thomas brings up.

Those kinds of critiques will have to come from outside the Washington establishment--from people like Helen Thomas, Cindy Sheehan, and those on the left who point out that the war was not some well intentioned but mismanaged affair, but rather it was in fact an immoral act of US aggression.

Posted by The Haikuist at 3:06 PM | Permalink | Comments

As this article published yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle points out, the Democrats, even those ostensibly "antiwar", are all talk and no action with respect to the Iraq War. The fact is that the Democrats, if they were serious about ending the war in Iraq, will now have a simple tool at their disposal as the majority party in Congress, a tool that was used late in the Vietnam War. They could simply refuse to fund the war.

But that isn't in the cards. For example congressman George Miller, a senior Democrat and strong ally of Nancy Pelosi, claims to be against the war. But rather than calling for an immediate withdrawal, he wants a slower withdrawal that will take six months--which will mean six more months of American soldiers dying in a needless conflict. Tellingly, the article reports that "Miller ruled out cutting off funding for the war." Well, surprise, surprise.

The article points out clearly that without being willing to use the option of cutting off funding, the Democrats' position on the Iraq War is simply one of meaningless posturing and utter impotence:

Bush can maintain course in Iraq if he insists on it, some believe.

"The only way for Democrats to undo that preference is to de-fund it, and they've said over and over again that they're not willing to do that," said Stephen Biddle, a senior defense policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former chair of military studies at the U.S. Army War College. "So what are they going to do? Kill him by op-ed column?"

Herein lies the problem. As usual, the Democrats who are portrayed in the media as "antiwar" are all about putting up a show, while in reality they are completely divorced from the priorities and values of the bona fide antiwar movement in this country.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments