"Broken, Worn Out" and "Living Hand to Mouth"Revolt of the Generals

"Broken, Worn Out" and "Living Hand to Mouth"
The Revolt of the Generals
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032005.html
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The immense significance of Rep John Murtha's November 17 speech calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq is that it signals mutiny in the US senior officer corps, seeing the institution they lead as "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth", to use the biting words of their spokesman, John Murtha, as he reiterated on December his denunciation of Bush's destruction of the Army.

It took the traveling White House about 48 hours to realize that this was a dumb thing to have said. Murtha's not the kind of guy you can slime, the way Bush and Co did the glass-jawed Kerry in 2004. The much decorated vet Murtha snapped back publicly that he hadn't much time for smears from people like Cheney who'd got five deferments from military service in Vietnam.



Ten days after Murtha's speech commentators on the tv Sunday talk shows were clambering aboard the Bring eem home bandwagon. Voices calling for America to istay the course" in Iraq were few and far between. On December 1 Murtha returned to the attack in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, telling a civic group there that he was wrong to have voted for the war and that most U.S. troops will leave Iraq within a year because the Army is "broken, worn out" and "living hand to mouth".

The stench of panic in Washington that hangs like a winter fog over Capitol Hill intensified. The panic stems from the core concern of every politician in the nation's capital: survival. The people sweating are Republicans and the source of their terror is the deadly message spelled out in every current poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster for the Republican Party in next year's midterm elections.

Assuming that Cockburn's article is indeed correct, I can't help but wonder how many senior officers in the US military are thinking that things were better when Bill Clinton was President or wondering if they would have been better off if Al Gore had been sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States on January 20th, 2001?

Instead of liberating Paris in '44 we are occupying HUE in '68.
As Michael Herr said in Dispatches, " Hell sucks."
The Chimperor and Dick are in an ever shrinking world.
They definately should not have picked on Murtha.

We're going to need a de-Bushification program in the not too far off future

What happened on the heels of this speech is very instructive. The Democrats fell over themselves distancing themselves from Murtha, emboldening the White House to go one the attack.

From Bush's presidential plane, touring Asia, came the derisive comment that Murtha was of "endorsing the policies of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

It took the traveling White House about 48 hours to realize that this was a dumb thing to have said. Murtha's not the kind of guy you can slime, the way Bush and Co did the glass-jawed Kerry in 2004. The much decorated vet Murtha snapped back publicly that he hadn't much time for smears from people like Cheney who'd got five deferments from military service in Vietnam.

By the weekend Bush was speaking of Murtha respectfully. On Monday, gritting his teeth, Cheney told a Washington audience that though he disagreed with Murtha ihe's a good man, a Marine, a patriot, and he's taking a clear stand in an entirely legitimate discussion."

Worth a read...

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12032005.html

"By late summer of 2006, when voters are deciding what they want their Senate and House to look like, if the Democrats have not caught up to public opinion to offer a tangible and quick exit from Iraq, the Republicans will retain control of both chambers of congress.

All that will be left in November is mush from Kerry, Hillary, Biden, Edwards - and Obama's - mouths."

Seems to me that many of the leading Dems are just daring the far right to co-opt this issue.

At least Pelosi has finally gotten a clue. 2006 could be ugly if the Senate Dems don't step up to the plate and start swinging early next year.

If the Democratic Party as represented by our congressmen cannot step up and support these guys then it doesn't deserve to exist.

I truly believe that this is a critical time for the survival of democratic politics in the US and the Democratic Party has to choose either to support it's base or go the way of the Whigs.