[Peace-discuss] Democrats subvert anti-war movement

[John W.]

"Even Americans can't be fooled forever," Taibbi concludes.  Au contraire, 
they very obviously CAN.



At 11:26 PM 2/9/2008, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>["Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have systematically taken over 
>the anti-war movement, packing the nation's leading group with party 
>consultants more interested in attacking the GOP than ending the war ... 
>The story of how the Democrats finally [sic] betrayed the voters who 
>handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of 
>what's to come if they win the White House." This is pretty old news, but 
>still unusual even in the semi-MSM, like this.  --CGE]
>
>URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18349197/the_chicken_doves
>
>         Rollingstone.com
>         The Chicken Doves
>         Elected to end the war, Democrats have surrendered to Bush on Iraq
>         and betrayed the peace movement for their own political ends
>         MATT TAIBBI
>
>Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring 
>Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo 
>Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome 
>political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. At long last, the 
>Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, 
>just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.
>
>Solidifying his reputation as one of the biggest pussies in U.S. political 
>history, Reid explained his decision to refocus his party's energies on 
>topics other than ending the war by saying he just couldn't fit Iraq into 
>his busy schedule. "We have the presidential election," Reid said 
>recently. "Our time is really squeezed."
>
>There was much public shedding of tears among the Democratic leadership, 
>as Reid, Pelosi and other congressional heavyweights expressed deep 
>sadness that their valiant charge up the hill of change had been thwarted 
>by circumstances beyond their control — that, as much as they would love 
>to continue trying to end the catastrophic Iraq deal, they would now have 
>to wait until, oh, 2009 to try again. "We'll have a new president," said 
>Pelosi. "And I do think at that time we'll take a fresh look at it."
>
>Pelosi seemed especially broken up about having to surrender on Iraq, 
>sounding like an NFL coach in a postgame presser, trying with a straight 
>face to explain why he punted on first-and-goal. "We just didn't have any 
>plays we liked down there," said the coach of the 0-15 Dems. "Sometimes 
>you just have to play the field-position game...."
>
>In reality, though, Pelosi and the Democrats were actually engaged in some 
>serious point-shaving. Working behind the scenes, the Democrats have 
>systematically taken over the anti-war movement, packing the nation's 
>leading group with party consultants more interested in attacking the GOP 
>than ending the war. "Our focus is on the Republicans," one Democratic 
>apparatchik in charge of the anti-war coalition declared. "How can we 
>juice up attacks on them?"
>
>The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them 
>both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what's to 
>come if they win the White House. And if we don't pay attention to this 
>sorry tale now, while there's still time to change our minds about whom to 
>nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for 
>four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame.
>
>The controversy over the Democratic "strategy" to end the war basically 
>comes down to whom you believe. According to the Reid-Pelosi version of 
>history, the Democrats tried hard to force President Bush's hand by 
>repeatedly attempting to tie funding for the war to a scheduled 
>withdrawal. Last spring they tried to get him to eat a timeline and failed 
>to get the votes to override a presidential veto. Then they retreated and 
>gave Bush his money, with the aim of trying again after the summer to 
>convince a sufficient number of Republicans to cross the aisle in support 
>of a timeline.
>
>But in September, Gen. David Petraeus reported that Bush's "surge" in Iraq 
>was working, giving Republicans who might otherwise have flipped 
>sufficient cover to continue supporting the war. The Democrats had no 
>choice, the legend goes, but to wait until 2009, in the hopes that things 
>would be different under a Democratic president.
>
>Democrats insist that the reason they can't cut off the money for the war, 
>despite their majority in both houses, is purely political. "George Bush 
>would be on TV every five minutes saying that the Democrats betrayed the 
>troops," says Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Then he glumly adds another 
>reason. "Also, it just wasn't going to happen."
>
>Why it "just wasn't going to happen" is the controversy. In and around the 
>halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made a sincere effort to 
>end the war meets with, at best, derisive laughter. Though few 
>congressional aides would think of saying so on the record, in private 
>many dismiss their party's lame anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony 
>show, a calculated attempt to score political points without ever being 
>serious about bringing the troops home.
>
>"Yeah, the amount of expletives that flew in our office alone was 
>unbelievable," says an aide to one staunchly anti-war House member. "It 
>was all about the public show. Reid and Pelosi would say they were taking 
>this tough stand against Bush, but if you actually looked at what they 
>were sending to a vote, it was like Swiss cheese. Full of holes."
>
>In the House, some seventy Democrats joined the Out of Iraq caucus and 
>repeatedly butted heads with Reid and Pelosi, arguing passionately for 
>tougher measures to end the war. The fight left some caucus members bitter 
>about the party's failure. Rep. Barbara Lee of California was one of the 
>first to submit an amendment to cut off funding unless it was tied to an 
>immediate withdrawal. "I couldn't even get it through the Rules Committee 
>in the spring," Lee says.
>
>Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a fellow caucus member, says Democrats should have 
>refused from the beginning to approve any funding that wasn't tied to a 
>withdrawal. "If we'd been bold the minute we got control of the House — 
>and that's why we got the majority, because the people of this country 
>wanted us out of Iraq — if we'd been bold, even if we lost the votes, we 
>would have gained our voice."
>
>An honest attempt to end the war, say Democrats like Woolsey and Lee, 
>would have involved forcing Bush to execute his veto and allowing the 
>Republicans to filibuster all they wanted. Force a showdown, in other 
>words, and use any means necessary to get the bloodshed ended.
>
>"Can you imagine Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert taking no for an answer the 
>way Reid and Pelosi did on Iraq?" asks the House aide in the 
>expletive-filled office. "They'd find a way to get the votes. They'd get 
>it done somehow."
>
>But any suggestion that the Democrats had an obligation to fight this good 
>fight infuriates the bund of hedging careerists in charge of the party. In 
>fact, nothing sums up the current Democratic leadership better than its 
>vitriolic criticisms of those recalcitrant party members who insist on 
>interpreting their 2006 mandate as a command to actually end the war. Rep. 
>David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a key 
>Pelosi-Reid ally, lambasted anti-war Democrats who "didn't want to get 
>specks on those white robes of theirs." Obey even berated a soldier's 
>mother who begged him to cut off funds for the war, accusing her and her 
>friends of "smoking something illegal."
>
>Rather than use the vast power they had to end the war, Democrats devoted 
>their energy to making sure that "anti-war activism" became synonymous 
>with "electing Democrats." Capitalizing on America's desire to end the 
>war, they hijacked the anti-war movement itself, filling the ranks of 
>peace groups with loyal party hacks. Anti-war organizations essentially 
>became a political tool for the Democrats — one operated from inside the 
>Beltway and devoted primarily to targeting Republicans.
>
>This supposedly grass-roots "anti-war coalition" met regularly on K 
>Street, the very capital of top-down Beltway politics. At the forefront of 
>the groups are Thomas Matzzie and Brad Woodhouse of Americans Against the 
>Escalation in Iraq, the leader of the anti-war lobby. Along with other K 
>Street crusaders, the two have received iconic treatment from The 
>Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which depicted the 
>anti-war warriors as young idealist-progressives in shirtsleeves, riding a 
>mirthful spirit into political combat — changing the world is fun!
>
>But what exactly are these young idealists campaigning for? At its most 
>recent meeting, the group eerily echoed the Reid-Pelosi "squeezed for 
>time" mantra: Retreat from any attempt to end the war and focus on 
>electing Democrats. "There was a lot of agreement that we can draw 
>distinctions between anti-war Democrats and pro-war Republicans," a 
>spokeswoman for Americans Against the Escalation in Iraq announced.
>
>What the Post and the Times failed to note is that much of the anti-war 
>group's leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes — 
>whose partners, Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes, served as staffers for 
>the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). In addition, these 
>anti-war leaders continue to consult for many of the same U.S. senators 
>whom they need to pressure in order to end the war. This is the kind of 
>conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the 
>activist community.
>
>Worst of all is the case of Woodhouse, who came to Hildebrand Tewes after 
>years of working as the chief mouthpiece for the DSCC, where he campaigned 
>actively to re-elect Democratic senators who supported the Iraq War in the 
>first place. Anyone bothering to look — and clearly the Post and the Times 
>did not before penning their ardent bios of Woodhouse — would have found 
>the youthful idealist bragging to newspapers before the Iraq invasion 
>about the pro-war credentials of North Carolina candidate Erskine Bowles. 
>"No one has been stronger in this race in supporting President Bush in the 
>War on Terror and his efforts to effect a regime change in Iraq," boasted 
>the future "anti-war" activist Woodhouse.
>
>With guys like this in charge of the anti-war movement, much of what has 
>passed for peace activism in the past year was little more than a thinly 
>veiled scheme to use popular discontent over the war to unseat vulnerable 
>Republicans up for re-election in 2008. David Sirota, a former 
>congressional staffer whose new book, The Uprising, excoriates the 
>Democrats for their failure to end the war, expresses disgust at the 
>strategy of targeting only Republicans. "The whole idea is based on this 
>insane fiction that there is no such thing as a pro-war Democrat," he 
>says. "Their strategy allows Democrats to take credit for being against 
>the war without doing anything to stop it. It's crazy."
>
>Justin Raimondo, the uncompromising editorial director of Antiwar.com, 
>regrets contributing twenty dollars to Americans Against the Escalation in 
>Iraq. "Not only did they use it to target Republicans," he says, "they 
>went after the ones who were on the fence about Iraq." The most notorious 
>case involved Lincoln Chafee, a moderate from Rhode Island who lost his 
>Senate seat in 2006. Since then, Chafee has taken shots at Democrats like 
>Reid, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, all of whom campaigned against 
>him despite having voted for the war themselves.
>
>"Look, I understand partisan politics," says Chafee, who now concedes that 
>voters were correct to punish him for his war vote. "I just find it 
>amusing that those who helped get us into this mess now say we need to 
>change the Senate — because we're in a mess."
>
>The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that 
>it's now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the 
>presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — 
>the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them 
>credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise 
>they've made to the contrary, in the end they've done nothing but vote for 
>war and cough up every dime they've been asked to give, every step of the way.
>
>Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every 
>time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, 
>twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies 
>who participated in Bush's notorious wiretapping program. Before that, 
>Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he 
>kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as 
>torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about 
>upsetting the country's gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole 
>that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid 
>by ordinary citizens.
>
>But the war is where they showed their real mettle. Before the 2006 
>elections, Democrats told us we could expect more specifics on their war 
>plans after Election Day. Nearly two years have passed since then, and now 
>they are once again telling us to wait until after an election to see real 
>action to stop the war. In the meantime, of course, we're to remember that 
>they're the good guys, the Republicans are the real enemy, and, well, go 
>Hillary! Semper fi! Yay, team!
>
>How much of this bullshit are we going to take? How long are we supposed 
>to give the Reids and Pelosis and Hillarys of the world credit for 
>wanting, deep down in their moldy hearts, to do the right thing?
>
>Look, fuck your hearts, OK? Just get it done. Because if you don't, sooner 
>or later this con is going to run dry. It may not be in '08, but it'll be 
>soon. Even Americans can't be fooled forever.
>
>         ###