Hell to Pay for Many Democrats

They may want to lay it off on Chimpie that they were duped, but the truth is that most of the Democrats who voted for authorization for use of force in Iraq back in 2002 did it because they were and are lily-livered, bottom-feeding, political opportunists who care about one thing above all else--their power. They're no different than their Republican counterparts in this one area. Although they may have a slightly different political ideology, or at least mouth slight variations on the same themes, when it's ball-cuttin' time, they don't examine their hearts, or speak their truth, or do what's right. No, what they do is what makes them morally suspect whether in or out of power--they pander. They pander to the worst and simplest and basest and most craven impulses of the people they serve in order to remain in office. And on this count, they sold us out.

The chief culprits in all this are John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton, because of their presidential ambitions and because they constituted the party leadership. While Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were crying in the wilderness from the get-go that Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Hadley, et. al. were working the evidence to reach a foregone conclusion, no prominent member of the opposition party had the guts to stand up in their faces and call bullshit on everything that we now know IS bullshit, 2059 dead Americans and tens of thousands of dead Iraqis later. If Kerry or Clinton had stood up and opposed this war crime vehemently, it would not have marginalized them--it would have made them into true leaders, instead of the sorrowful hacks we've already had to suffer from for far too long.

This talk of Hillary Clinton as the inevitable candidate in 2008 makes me sick. I used to like her, because she was smarter than most of the other senators, quick on her feet, and seemed to have a collection of strong principles on which she operated. But her vote on the war resolution was so clearly calculated, so carefully weighed, that it revealed her as an even viler offender of the public trust. And as such, she doesn't deserve this vote.

Their cowardice not only enabled this war, but now is enabling Chimpie to defend his decision because, in his logic, they were as stupid (or corrupt) as he was. And to hear the Dems whine that they were fooled is pathetic. How was anyone fooled? Go look at those tapes of the case for war. Bush, Cheney, Powell, all visibly lying, or at least very, very uncomfortable in what they were saying, because, see, they didn't know at the time how easily the opposition would fold. What glee they must have had to see how easily they could cow their Democratic counterparts into playing along.

My friends and I were protesting a Bush visit in September, 2002, and then protesting against the war in San Francisco before in started in 2003 and then again in 2004, and we went to high schools to counter the recruiters, plus many other actions in print and on the streets, like a 4th of July parade in which a confrontation with Toys for Tots ex-marines revealed just how deeply this ugliness in the American character festers.

But for once, at least, my conscience is clear. Let's hope that the conscience of each of the enabling quislings in the Democratic Party still has some power to redeem them.