audio:
http://www.patriotsherald.com/movies.php?m=GenPatton.mov
Speaker of the House - leader of Congress - Nancy Pelosi is caught in a Hollywood time-warp. On the one hand, George C. Scott's monologue as General Patton instructing the audience on the virtues and glory of war is an ancient concept from the age of calvary, from before the invention of automatic weapons, poison gas, and aerial bombs, much less from before nuclear weapons, turned humans into canon fodder on a previously unimagined scale. On the other hand, Americas STILL LOVE A WINNER, and can not stand the notion of losing.
It is the fear of being TAGGED for all eternity as "the leader who LOST the Iraq war" that has Nancy Pelosi as terrified as a family in Baghdad, not knowing if the knock at their door is a trigger happy American patrol, a Sunni militia ethnic cleansing squad, or a vengeful Shiite ethnic cleansing raid.
Speaker Pelosi GAVE UP her ability to MAKE GEORGE W. BUSH _THE_ personification of the hated, never-ending war, when she "TOOK IMPEACHMENT OFF THE TABLE." Now, America is STUCK with the remaining months of the Bush-Cheney presidency, and for the next 100 years Republicans will blame Democrats for the debacle that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and a host of Right-Wing neocons created, planned, and misadministered, into a legacy of potential war crimes, broken bodies, billions in deficits, and an increasingly hair-trigger world. A world that in an instant could destroy the half century of global commerce and cooperation we have all come to know and depend on.
Speaker Pelosi, like so many other senior Democrats, has fallen victim to the notion that "LEADERSHIP" means going to fundraisers, telling your donors what they want to hear, putting on well-marketed and pretty election campaigns to pacify voters, and trying not to ruffle the feathers of your fellow senior party leaders, by which you win brownie points and become elected leader by your peers.
SOMETIMES _LEADERSHIP_ means doing what may not be popular in the short-term, to achieve what is BEST in the long term. By FAILING to make the many crimes, omissions, derelictions of duty, gross failures, and ongoing CORRUPTION of the Bush-Cheney White House the FOCUS of a national IMPEACHMENT debate, Speaker Pelosi has squandered that opportunity. By refusing to DEFEND AMERICAN VALUES she now looks like a shell-shocked denzian of NO-MAN'S-LAND... which in fact she is.
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Weak Has a Face, and It's Speaker Nancy Pelosi's
Posted October 3, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/darin-murphy/weak-has-a-face-and-its_b_66987.html
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Vote on Iraq Again and Again
by SENATOR RUSS FEINGOLD
Posted October 3, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-russ-feingold/vote-on-iraq-again-and-ag_b_66938.html
Over in Iraq, our troops get up every day and risk their lives in the middle of an Iraqi civil war. They have to do their job, no matter what the risk, and no matter what the cost. They do what they are asked to do...and so should Congress. Congress's job right now should be to bring our troops home safely, and we can't turn away from this issue just because it's tough going. The only way we will ever get our troops out is by putting constant pressure on supporters of this disastrous war. Let's make them vote again and again, so that they have to go back home and explain why they keep voting to keep our troops in Iraq. When they feel the heat for their vote, that's when they will change their vote, and that's how we will bring our troops home.
The message from the voters last November was clear -- safely redeploy our troops out of Iraq. Telling ourselves "we don't have the votes now, so what's the point" doesn't cut it. I understand that we may not get to 67 or 60 or even 50 votes on Feingold-Reid right now. But remember, when I first proposed that Congress use its constitutional power of the purse to end the war, support was scarce at best. Now, the majority of Senate Democrats, including our leadership and presidential candidates, are firm supporters. If we give in to the defeatist "we don't have the votes" attitude, we're playing right into the hands of the president and supporters of his war who cannot wait for the day they don't have to talk about Iraq. If supporters of this war are going to vote to keep our troops in a situation that is hurting our military as well as our national security, they should be prepared to defend it every day.
