Senate GOP wants Bush to take on unemployment

You can tell this is an election year in which Republicans are running scared. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a number of add-ons for the upcoming Iraq war funding bill, including things such as a 13-week extension in unemployment benefits.

The GOP doesn’t like these things, but in an election year in which Republicans are vulnerable in several Senate seats and running from behind, the Senate GOP is ready to try pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

They’ll let Reid get his amendments, without the threat of filibuster, then led Bush veto the omnibus bill.

They’ll then vote to uphold Bush’s veto, while trying to blame him for the whole problem.

How, how well the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee can explain this to the public is the key issue.

Iraq more pricey than Nam – ask McCain about cost

Only World War II has now cost m ore than Iraq.

The costs of maintaining a US presence in Iraq now runs a tab of about $435 million a day — $3 billion a week, or $12 billion a month. The US has siphoned some $500 billion taxpayer dollars into Iraq, for a war that was supposed to be “sharp” and brief. Interest payments add another $615 billion, and the price tag of repairing a depleted military is projected at $280 billion.

Only World War II, in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, was more expensive, according to a recent study by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance Professor Laura Bilmes. Both served in the Clinton administration.

Here’s another financial analysis.of the expensive war:

The price tag in Iraq now is more than double the cost of the Korean War and a third more expensive than the Vietnam War, which lasted 12 years. Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate that it will be at least 10 times as costly as the 1991 Gulf War and twice the cost of World War I.

Only World War II was more expensive. That four-year war — in which 16 million U.S. troops were deployed on two fronts, fighting against Germany and Japan — cost about $5 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Of course, LBJ’s “guns and butter,” along with the rise in inflation it provoked, was part of what chased him out of office.

So, if Schmuck Talk Express™ is so serious about staying there 100 years, if necessary, when is the MSM press going to ask him what he would do differently than President Bush on paying for the war.

This is yet another one of those areas where Schmuck Talk has gotten a free pass from the media.

$3 TRILLION, not $60 billion, for Iraq

Let me see. That means our Preznit was wrong by a factor of 50, or 5,000 (five thousand) percent, on the cost of the Iraq war, according to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz.

High oil prices? Iraq War.

Budget deficits? Iraq War.

Increased international borrowing? Iraq War.

Credit crunch? Iraq War.

Housing bubble? Iraq War.

Here’s some details from Stiglitz’ comment to a London think tank:

The former World Bank vice-president said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $3trillion compared with the $50-$60-billion predicted in 2003.

Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.

The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said. …

Professor Stiglitz, an academic at the Columbia Business School and a former economic adviser to president Bill Clinton, said a further $US500 billion was going to be spent on the fighting in the next two years and that could have been used more effectively to improve the security and quality of life of Americans and the rest of the world. …

“When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

“(Then defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said ‘baloney,’ and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion.

“Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that.” …

Professor Stiglitz attributed to the Iraq war $US5-$US10 of the almost $US80-a-barrel increase in oil prices since the start of the war, adding that it would have been reasonable to attribute more than $US35 of that rise to the war.

Stiglitz added that BushCo figures were off so much in large part due to its massive underestimating of long-term post-battle medical costs.

Kevin Drum not batting well on Iraq this week

After yesterday telling "second tier" Democratic presidential candidates to withdraw, Drum now says that without a cloture-proof 60, let alone a veto-proof 67 in the Senate, Democrats are hamstrung on Iraq action.

Once again, like, you're wrong, wrong, wrong on Iraq, Kevin.

The magic number in the Senate is 41; that prevents cloture and blocks any funding bill that doesn't defund Iraq.

You’re wrong, Kevin, and Harry Reid is wrong when he says the same thing. I believe more and more that Ted Rall is right about Congressional Democrats on Iraq.

If it takes government gridlock or a funding meltdown by invoking cloture against ANY budget bill that continues to fund Iraq, that’s what it takes.

Do it, dammit.

I read Kevin’s post right after hearing Reid make the same claim on All Things Considered, followed by Mitch (I’m the lying senator McConnell, not the lying intelligence director McConnell) McConnell.

And I was steamed.

Gates wants to swap surge for ‘South Korea’ in Iraq

The Wall Street Journal reports that’s the strategy Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is looking at proposing to Congressional Democrats:

What Mr. Gates and some other high-ranking administration officials have in mind is a modern-day version of President Harry Truman’s “Cold War consensus,” a bipartisan agreement on the need to contain the Soviet Union. They hope lawmakers from both parties will ultimately agree to make a scaled-back U.S. mission in Iraq a central component of U.S. foreign policy even after Mr. Bush leaves office.

No thanks, I’ll say, for several reasons.

First, Democrats would be giving credence to the BushCo theory of “if we don’t fight them there, we’ll be fighting them here.”

Second, this assumes that Iraqis will be as accepting of a long-term U.S. military presence as South Koreans were.

Third, it presumes that such a long-term presence would magically make an Iraqi government more functional and Iraqi police and military units “step up.”

Fourth, what sort of numbers is Gates talking about remaining? What are the troops expected to do?

Fifth, the comparison and analogy of a religiously and ethnically multipartate Iraq to a nearly monolithic South Korea simply falters.

That said, I’m concerned many Democrats will take the bait, figuring they can make further changes after the 2008 elections.

Well, instead, they should consider a page, and a word, adapted, from Nixon. Start talking about the “Iraqification” of the conflict.

Senate Dems plan Iraq timetables again: an analysis

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid plans to attach two Iraq timetable amendments to the 2008 defense appropriations bill.

Without immediately looking at the possibility of success, there are two incidents which do bring this back to the forefront (not counting Congressional Democrats’ sagging approval ratings as an “incident”).

First is Gen. Martin Dempsey’s admission that training of Iraq army and security forces remains inadequate, even woefully so:

Describing the U.S. effort in Iraq as a labor of Sisyphus, he said the metaphoric stone is “probably rolling back a bit right now in Baghdad. But I don't think it's going to roll over us.”

Dempsey depicted the level of violence tolerated by Iraqis as “mind-numbing” and acknowledged that a dearth of security has made some Iraqis nostalgic for the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. “You’ll hear people say, ‘You know, we were a lot more secure and safe during the Saddam regime,’ “ he told the oversight panel of the House Armed Services Committee.

Second is Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe’s direct blaming of Bush, and Bush’s stubbornness MO, for the 2006 loss of the Senate:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said she thinks her former GOP colleagues Sens. Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Lincoln Chafee (R.I.) lost reelection because of Bush’s unpopularity.

“It’s definitely because of the president and his policies, more from the standpoint of immovability and not being willing to adjust policies in response to real-time circumstances,” she said. “It wasn’t just the fact that things weren’t working well in Iraq, it was the president wasn’t willing to adjust his policy to recognize and acknowledge that.”

Last year’s losses at the polls have shaped her Republican colleagues’ view of the president in 2007, she said, adding, “All of that had manifested itself in ways this year, leading to concerns about the president’s policies.”

Now, we’ve heard enough of this in the past, but, as the drip, drip, drip of not-so-good news from people like Gen. Dempsey picks up, senators and representatives may in fact start distancing themselves more.

So, where does this all lead?

Key for seeing how Republicans move is seeing how this plays out in their presidential primaries battle. Already, while trying to out-macho each other on terrorism in general, most GOP candidates not named McCain are trying to detach from Iraq itself, and even Big John has been somewhat critical.

Reid has plenty of GOP senator sound-bite quotes, in other words. Let’s see how well he plays his cards.

Because, between discontentment over Democrats’ previous “cave” and knowing how the Rovian PR machine works, Reid (and Speaker Pelosi) need to have their own PR work ready in advance. That’s where quotes from GOP presidential debates and elsewhere on the hustings will come in handy — rhetorically asking GOP senators if they want to be sticking their necks out at the same time their would-be presidential nominees are drawing theirs in?

Democrats: Quivering in fear of “Big Bad Bush”

Congressional Democrats are pushing an Iraq funding bill with no timetable teeth because they’re afraid of Big Bad Bush huffing and puffing:

Democrats said they did not relish the prospect of leaving Washington for a Memorial Day break — the second recess since the financing fight began — and leaving themselves vulnerable to White House attacks that they were again on vacation while the troops were wanting. That criticism seemed more politically threatening to them than the anger Democrats knew they would draw from the left by bowing to Mr. Bush.

Ooh, ooh, quiver in fear. Geez, if you haven’t realized now that, especially against this administration, the best defense is a good offense, you probably NEVER will.

Meanwhile, we have bullshit coming from the mouthpiece of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi:

But scores of other Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, say they have no intention of voting for the more than $100 billion sought by the White House for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan because Mr. Bush refused to accede to timelines, readiness standards and other conditions. They have said repeatedly since taking control in January that they will not turn over more money for the war without some movement toward a withdrawal.

In allowing the war money measure to reach the floor with indifferent backing from her own party, Ms. Pelosi is breaking one of the cardinal rules of her predecessor, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, whose mantra was to legislate with the majority of the majority party.

“She is showing she is the speaker of the whole House,” said Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. “Even though she does not personally support it, she said the money will go to the troops and she is following through on that.”

No, Mr. Daly, she’s showing how much of a squish she is. If she doesn’t get a Democratic primary opponent in 2008, I will personally send money to a Green opponent in the general election, if I can.

Meanwhile, right now, the bottom-line question in the other chamber is if any Senate Democrat, Feingold if not Dodd, will stand up on the floor and do an old-fashioned filibuster, as Keith Olbermann has already starting clamoring for.

“Support the troops” a no-win proposition

Over at Washington Monthly, there’s a package of stories from recent war veterans on how Democratic presidential candidates might get their vote.

There’s also an in-depth analysis by Spencer Ackerman as to why those candidates shouldn’t be looking to the troops to guide their decisions, ultimately.

Spencer Ackerman's article is more important than any of the soldiers' stories in the package. He explains why “support the troops” short of “bring ’em home” is a no-win, for one thing:

Democrats have made the decision — rightly, I think — that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, “I don’t want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission.”

Ackerman indicates from enlisteds through noncoms into the corps of officers, a clear majority of boots on the ground still feel this way.

He touches on some of the reasons, which I’ll go into more.

First, too many soldiers have, to put it bluntly, some degree of ADDICTION to fighting after multiple tours in Iraq. (Note Ackerman quoting a soldier about having a “hard-on” about the possibility of killing alleged terrorists.

And yes, I do believe it’s a psychological addiction. In many cases, there’s at least the beginnings of post-traumatic stress disorder behind the development.

Plus, as Ackerman also notes, and as I agree, the “boots on the ground” have a narrow, sector-localized understanding of what is “successful.” Throw in the bar of “success” continually being lowered, and to take the addiction metaphor further, Democrats risk becoming “enablers.”

The idea of “support the troops” in any way short of supporting getting them home ASAP, because “the troops” still want to fight, is a losing proposition.

Democrats, already labeled as “out of touch with the military,” may be uncomfortable with what would appear to be a patronizing position, that “the troops don’t always know best.” But, that’s the bottom line. The key, though, as Ackerman notes, is to support the troops psychologically when they get back to America. Beyond adequate funding of Veterans Administration psychological treatment, this includes stressing that they never failed in their mission, but that the mission itself was a failure of design.

Novak: This “surrender” is it for Congressional Dems on Iraq

And, forget about next year, he says:

President Bush has won a rare showdown victory over Congress simply because Democrats felt they could not afford the risk of letting a war in progress run out of money. The Democrats' problem is that this demonstrates conclusively that they are all talk on the Iraq War — a fact that their base will quickly realize. There is no way for Congress to end the war short of cutting off funds, and to cut off funds without the consent of the President is to invite a repeat of exactly the same showdown the Democrats have now already lost.

Agreed that the bottom line is another showdown. So, fine, let’s have it. More than once, if necessary.

Novak goes on to say that if Democrats won’t do more this year, they certainly won’t next year:

The bottom line is that Democrats have passed on their best chance to end the Iraq War. If they are not willing to take a risk here in a non-election year in order to force Bush to end the war, then they certainly do not have what it takes to cut off war funds in the coming presidential election year.

I totally agree. We need real action, not noise-making and posturing. However, I’m not optimistic about what we will actually get, versus what we need.