The good new is that popular pressure works: every Democratic candidate with a Senate vote, even Hillary Clinton, voted for the Feingold-Reid amendment. Yes, they voiced reservations about this or that and, yes, in a world where legislators were responsive to citizens, not corporations, Feingold-Reid would be seen for what it is: an endorsement of Bush’s occupation and war. But in the actual world it was a small, timid step in the right direction.
The bad news – well, not exactly news -- is that the amendment lost badly and that Democrats sunk it. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, led the charge – on that grounds that the Senate must “support the troops.” Either he and his co-thinkers are idiots or they think the voters are -- or both. They really should try to rise above the moral and intellectual level of their colleague, Joe Lieberman, and understand at least this much: that you don’t support troops by pointlessly putting them in harm’s way, savagely disrupting their lives and the lives of their families, and turning a fair number of them into murderers and torturers. If they really want to support the troops, they should make sure that no more harm is done them and that they do no more harm. Bring them home NOW and make sure the government deals with them honorably when they return. For more than 3400 of them, it’s already too late.
But lets not despair. If unremitting pressure can bring along even the likes of a Joe Biden and a Hillary Clinton, then surely it can work on the miserable Carl Levin and the nineteen other miscreant Democrats who voted with him.
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More bad news: Tony Snow just used this vote to declare that "I think that sends a pretty powerful message...which is, the idea of withdrawing on a timetable is not something that the American people, or for that matter Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, support."
More good news: there is certainly more where the Feingold ammendment came from.
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