PAUL KRUGMAN: A Hostage Situation

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders.

What’s at stake right now is the latest Iraq “supplemental.” Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”......

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/04/paul-krugman-hostage-situation.html

for soldiers, just before extending them himself.

Great expression of what's really happening here.

Lakoff would be proud.

"...voters may well react with disgust, concluding that the whole debate over the war was nothing but political theater."

That's how I'll feel if that happens.

" New Direction for Iraq Act of 2007 "

Krugman is awesome. Great post!

PRESIDENT *

brilliant Krugman!!

fly

Bush on Iraq.

Impeach Gonzales, then Cheney, then Bush. And for no additional cost, you get Karl!

ψ is not only indifferent to the suffering/death of others (although he realizes that he must uphold the pretense of caring* -- and must demonstrate "loyalty" to his flunkeys and fellow-travelers, lest they panic and turn on him), but he seeks to use these things as tools -- and to take advantage of them, however they have come about.

*: "Compassionate conservative" was deliberately chosen because he is neither, but needed (needs) to pretend to be. In practice, he is an amoral, unfeeling, radical extremist.