Israel Threatened by the Moon; Congressional Democrats Speak Out

Via Señor Matthew Yglesias, I spy that "Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the [Democratic congressional] leadership [have] decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran." (One wonders: Donkey, or mule?) It all has to do with Isreal, whose security has benefitted greatly from current events in the Middle East.

You may recall that during the most recent Congressional elections, the most important elections of your and my lifetimes, the great battle of our time, in which many things would pass away, where we would all stand or fall, under the Shadow, great song and noise arose around the theme: Democrats, our only hope. The ThanksRalph coalition of Democratic dead-enders rose as convincingly as it could onto its hind legs and, having convinced itself of its own sapience, came whinnying at we few hold-outs that whatever we might think of the Donkle in ordinary times, such times had fled, and in our extraordinary era extraordinary measures were necessary, the least of which (went the argument) would be to cast a vote in favor of a national Democrat or two, for they had seen the light and were now Against the War. All sorts of hoary anhistoricisms popped up like crocuses in March, part of an ever-expanding gambit to justify the ways of God in Man . . . no, to justify the elevation of a new gang of grifters to the chambers and backrooms of the Republic. The worst of these was: "Do you really believe that if Al Gore had been elected president we'd be at war with Iraq now?" Al Gore, after all, had grown a beard, and had converted, like many fellow Party members, to anti-Iraqism at a moment when the catastrophic magnitude of our failure there had already become evident to every other person and fetus and now-departed spirit on the Earth and in the nine circles of heaven, all the way out to the black lodestone of souls where Mitt Romney and the rest of the latter day saints will find themselves ere they depart this vale.

Did I believe that we would be at war with Iraq? Under Gore? Yes, and double-yes. Here was a man who carved out his place in the senate as perhaps the most war-mongering senator, a man who never saw a military appropriation or a jingoistic strophe that he couldn't massage into a bland testimonial to the Albrightian indispensibility of the American State. He was chosen by Clinton for this particular quality, to lend some cruise-missile gravitas to the grits-and-hollers domestic campaign. He was a principle proponent of the now-infamous Iraq Liberation Act. If he and the Lieb had gone over the hump, you bet your underoos we'd have gone to war with Iraq. If he and the Lieb had ascended, we'd have never seen the Afghani sideshow; we'd have gone straight for Baghdad, and the Afghanis would've had to continue their civil war on their own. Qu'aurait eu aurait eu: Whatever would've been, would've been.

Yglesias accepts too readily that "Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy." Invoking Israeli security is like calling the children our future or firefighters heros. It's just a prettier poster to paste over a crumbling wall. We could invade Antarctica or the Moon, and someone somewhere would link it to the security of Israel. The usual suspects among big Donkle blogs will cry and wail: "Bush has a 3% approval rating; why won't the Democrats oppose him!" It's because they don't oppose him. They want to go to war with Iran. But they've learned that their political fortunes and therefore their pocketbooks benefit from keeping their fingerprints off the shotgun, so they're going to once again let the Elmer Fudd executive go blasting into the underbrush, then claim in a few years that they never expected he'd do what it was patently obvious from the very get-go that he intended. They want to attack Iran. It bears repeating. There is a bipartisan consensus in Washington on the "threat" to "our interests" that a "hostile Iranian regime" poses. All the jockeying you see is the antefacto attempt by the complicit parties to "limit exposure," as we say in business, to limit the perception of culpability for the benefit of the bottom line in the event that the plan fails, which, of course, it will.