I picked up this article off the Washington Post. Gary Hart is former U.S. Senator and ran for President a time or too. Unfortunately he had a case of Clintonitis and it derailed his political career after some off shore drilling with a lovely Donna Rice.

"Waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on," warned an anti-Vietnam war song those many years ago. The McGovern presidential campaign, in those days, which I know something about, is widely viewed as a cause for the decline of the Democratic Party, a gateway through which a new conservative era entered.

Like the cat that jumped on a hot stove and thereafter wouldn't jump on any stove, hot or cold, today's Democratic leaders didn't want to make that mistake again. Many supported the Iraq war resolution and -- as the Big Muddy is rising yet again -- now find themselves tongue-tied or trying to trump a war president by calling for deployment of more troops. Thus does good money follow bad and bad politics get even worse.

He's got this one right on the money. We've got ourselves in deep in Iraq and right now, it's a no-win scenario. We either cut and run, leave the whole region in chaos (as if it's not already) and lose face with the rest of the world and be basically called cowards. It would be the beginning of the end of the U.S. OR we could "stay the course" and continue to lose more troops every day. We've even got women coming home in body bags no less. We hope the Iraqi factions in the government can get this problems worked out long enough to get our troops out of there but that is also unlikely any time in the immediate future. Thanks Bush, you've gotten the whole nation into deep kimchee on this one.

But this cannot be done while the water is rising in the Big Muddy of the Middle East. No Democrat, especially one now silent, should expect election by default. The public trust must be earned, and speaking clearly, candidly and forcefully now about the mess in Iraq is the place to begin.

The real defeatists today are not those protesting the war. The real defeatists are those in power and their silent supporters in the opposition party who are reduced to repeating "Stay the course" even when the course, whatever it now is, is light years away from the one originally undertaken. The truth is we're way off course. We've stumbled into a hornet's nest. We've weakened ourselves at home and in the world. We are less secure today than before this war began.

Who now has the courage to say this?

Hackett almost won in Ohio in a heavily Republican district. We've got some in Kentucky who might stand a chance in the right kind of campaign and there are certainly others in the country. Find them, support them, get them elected. We need to change things now. 2006 will be here soon and we need to get Republicans and Democrats too for that matter who sit idly by and let our American soldiers die in a war we shouldn't have been in to begin with.

posted by Stithmeister @ 10:25 PM
 
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