Not quite, but it is true that while that there was much more opposition to the Iraq war than was ever given any representation on the teevee, plenty of Democrats (voters, not politicians) either supported it or were somewhat on the fence.
After all, would that nice Little Tommy Friedman, age 7, lead you astray?
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Saturday that the Iraqi army and police are capable of keeping security in the country when American troops leave "any time they want," though he acknowledged the forces need further weapons and training.
The embattled prime minister sought to show confidence at a time when congressional pressure is growing for a withdrawal and the Bush administration reported little progress had been made on the most vital of a series of political benchmarks it wants al-Maliki to carry out.
Al-Maliki said difficulty in enacting the measures was "natural" given Iraq's turmoil.
But one of his top aides, Hassan al-Suneid, rankled at the assessment, saying the U.S. was treating Iraq like "an experiment in an American laboratory." He sharply criticised the U.S. military, saying it was committing human rights violations, embarassing the Iraqi government with its tactics and cooperating with "gangs of killers" in its campaign against al-Qaida in Iraq.
There will come a point where all of the very serious members of Congress (the wanker caucus) will come together on some bill or another which will pretend to force Bush to do something about Iraq but which won't actually force him to do anything. David Broder will applaud, the media will praise the president for not vetoing it, and only us dirty fucking hippie bloggers will point out that it doesn't change a damn thing.
MR. FRIEDMAN: I don't think they could possibly be blamed for losing Iraq. We're at a stage now in Iraq, though, Tim, where all the issues that we were debating before--Do we have enough troops on the ground? What is the pace of training?--all the issues related to the Pentagon's performance here are still very much alive. Look what happened just in the last week--I mean, the number of American soldiers killed, the number of Iraqis killed. As much as I want this to succeed, as important as I believe this is, this is not over. It's not over for the Bush administration.
But I do believe that it is so important, and precisely because it's so important, it's too important to be left to the Bush administration alone. Democrats need to be in there. Joe Biden, who was here, gave a lot of good advice during the last two years to Rumsfeld that was ignored--OK?--about troop levels. And I believe that Democrats should be not only participating in this with their enthusiasm but with their ideas, and embracing it and trying to shape it. This is the biggest democratization project in the world going, and one that is fundamental to our national interests. The idea that the Democrats would just sulk on the side and basically put them in a situation where they only succeed if the country fails--that, to me, is as dumb as the day is long.
MR. RUSSERT: Do you think Iraq may be an issue in 2008?
MR. FRIEDMAN: I don't--I'm hoping it won't be. I'm hoping that we'll be beyond it.
While it was apparent at the time, I'm still amazed that our elite political discourse over the past few years has been carried on by shockingly stupid people who bought into transparently absurd premises.
At heart really is the knee-jerk libertarian reaction against government infringement on some nebulous concept of "liberty." Drop me in the middle of the desert and I am truly free, though it's not really the kind of freedom I am interested in.
If you want a place like Manhattan to exist you have to accept the masssive government that is a necessary condition for such a place. All of those people and buildings piled on top of each other requires a rather invasive and elaborate regulatory structure, as well as substantial government provision of public services. One can cosmetically "privatize" some of those services, a process which in practice involves expanding the local patronage machine, but that doesn't change the fact that the government is basically paying the bill. You need the kind of collective action which only government, or some equivalent with a different name, can provide.
Having said that, I do think libertarians could find their calling by focusing on stupid state and local laws, and I don't mean symbolic but not especially important things like seatbelt laws and smoking bans. Small businesses do face rather onerous regulations and taxation, often applied by corrupt and/or incompetent agencies, in many municipalities. There are genuine and pointless barriers to the kind of economic freedom libertarians talk about, but the federal payroll tax isn't really a particularly important one.
Took a trip to AndyLand today and I see his practice of conveying various bits of contextless bad news about Iran and affixing his new tag line "Know Hope" to them continues.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader mocked politicians of both parties as “Republicrats,” equally subservient to corporations and the wealthy. It was nonsense, of course: the modern G.O.P. is so devoted to the cause of making the rich richer that it makes even the most business-friendly Democrats look like F.D.R.
But right now, as I watch Senate Democrats waffle over what should be a clear issue of justice and sound tax policy — namely, whether managers of private equity funds and hedge funds should be subject to the same taxes as ordinary working Americans — I’m starting to feel that Mr. Nader wasn’t all wrong.
What’s at stake here is a proposal by House Democrats to tax “carried interest” as regular income. This would close a tax loophole that is complicated in detail, but basically lets fund managers take a large part of the fees they earn for handling other peoples’ money and redefine those fees, for tax purposes, as capital gains.
The effect of this redefinition is that income that should be considered by normal standards to be ordinary income taxed at a 35 percent rate is treated as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent instead. So fund managers get to pay a low tax rate that is supposed to provide incentives to risk-taking investors, even though they aren’t investors and they aren’t taking risks.
Just to provide a somewhat "shorter Chris Bowers," to an incredible degree causes/organizations/campaigns/hell, even just readers/etc... fail to understand that The Mighty Bloggers are mostly individuals with limited time and resources, and have rather unreasonable expectations about what we should be doing for them.
One thing that Bush has going for him is that for some reason the Very Wise Men in Washington are slow to understand that they don't actually get a say in anything, no matter how important they imagine they are.
I think Kevin is both correct and giving them too much credit. The only "bad guys" we can kill are those we label "al Qaeda" because anything else basically involves taking sides in any number of sectarian conflicts.
However that's not the same thing as saying this is the most useful thing to do. Maintaining security doesn't simply involve trying to kill "the bad guys," and killing the bad guys also generally involves killing some not bad people especially when air power is involved.
More than that, "fighting al Qaeda" is simply Bush administration propaganda for what the entire war effort is about. Bush thinks we're fighting al Qaeda, the public thinks "fighting terrorists" is a noble cause, and 6 years later we're still linking all this up to a horrible day in September when a bunch of guys not from Iraq killed a bunch of people on US soil.
The administration has never been able to distinguish their propaganda about what was going on in Iraq with what was actually going on in Iraq.
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