E. J. Dionne, Jr. says it was a bad week for the Bush Administration on the Iraq war. He points to poll numbers suggesting that opponents of the war are intense than proponents, to speeches in the Senate that follow, rather than lead (of course, he didn’t put it that way), and to Pennsylvania Democrat John Murtha, whose call to bring the troops home is supposed to be news. Well, Instapundit and friends demonstrate that Murtha has been publicly grousing about the war since late 2003.
From where I sit, the good news is that the Bush Administration has begun to respond to the drumbeat of criticism, both about the prewar intelligence and about the calls for a withdrawal timetable. If adopted, the latter would of course communicate to our adversaries that if only they’re patient, they’ll prevail.
and his opponents’ Orwellian efforts to falsify the nature of the debate in late 2002 and early 2003 are disgraceful.
Still, I worry that Bush, distracted by the Katrina brouhaha and the Miers mistake (since called back, thank God), has waited too long to respond and in the meantime let the Copperheads and other assorted defeatists gain critical momentum in the public-relations battle. But this has been a pattern with Bush throughout his career--he tends to sit back too long, IMHO--and he’s always managed to rally and restore the situation in time. Here’s hoping he can pull that off again, as the consequences of the retreat in Iraq that the defeatist are trying to chivvy and shriek us into with all their lies and scurrilities are consequences that are truly awful to contemplate.
Murtha’s speech just shows how futile it is to try to "work with Democrats."
Even the sanest of them are against us.
Mr. Knippenberg - because I know that you are concerned with journalistic fairness and straight reporting, are you at all bothered that both the New York Times and the Washington Post have failed to report the Democratic response to Bush & Cheney’s accusations of historical revisionism and that their critics were being unpatriotic? Shouldn’t we hear these replies?
Oh well let them (our adversaries) think they prevailed, the pratling fools are just like the idiots in Gaza who after Israel withdrew turned on themselves Mafia style. A lot of it is unemployment and a belief that they are entitled. We probably assume that too much of this terrorism is linked to Islam, when it is actually people with weapons looking for a justification which they are provided temporarily by the existence of U.S. troops.
the vote on withdrawal that the House GOP brought to the floor yesterday. It exposed the Democrats for what they are: Thoroughly unserious.
I do believe that Rep. Murtha stated that our troops are now the main target of the terrorists. "We are now the enemy".
Well, it seems to me that lately the targets have been innocent Iraqi’s in market places, funerals, mosques, et.al.
I reckon Mr. Murtha and his staff have or are living in an alternate universe.