Take your pick: Passing political battles or permanently dead bodies

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2007/03/take_your_pick_.html

Take your pick: Passing political battles or permanently dead bodies

It's crunch time for House Democrats on this mess of a war.

Their leadership has already modified John Murtha's original proposal -- the one stipulating that in the best of all mediocre worlds, U.S. forces, at the very least, are to be trained and equipped before sent into combat -- watering it down so the president can bypass the stipulation as long as he goes to Congress first and fabricates an urgent need for a watery exemption.

That parliamentary cave-in didn't exactly set the stage for intraparty comity. The Blue Dogs were appeased, of course, but party liberals -- otherwise known as the party's conscience -- were royally upset and rightfully so; just as thousands of untrained, ill-equipped troops were, I would think.

But the compromising abuse of House liberals didn't stop there. According to Politico's "The Crypt," the speaker is now "facing a full-blown revolt" from the abovementioned party's conscience "over the $98 billion Iraq supplemental bill" -- the already waterlogged one -- "because it doesn't ... includ setting a date certain for withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq." That just sort of slid into the watery muck of presidential and Blue Dog appeasement.

So an uproar among the conscientious ensued, causing the Democratic leadership "to postpone markup of the Iraq bill in the House Appropriations Committee by at least a week ... to buy time to resolve the matter."

But not to worry, says a "senior Democrat lawmaker" in the most savory of Panglossian pabulum. The speaker "will get everyone on board at the end of the day."

On board what? The RMS Lusitania?

I led off by saying it's crunch time -- and crunch time it is. No more time-buying postponements to work out the unworkable. We're down to the nut of it, the black and white of either train or not train, equip or not equip, schedule a withdrawal or concede, at minimum, two more years of bloody futility. There is no in-between. The buying of liberal House members with new post offices or bike paths won't cut it. We either stay with proper support, or we go.

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