I've been reading the last half day or so - here on Kos and on MyDD... how the conservatives `lost' and the Dems, especially `moderate Dems' won... on `The Compromise' to avoid the `Nuclear Option'...They cite all the `rage' among wing nutz over `The Compromise'... and how our guys out maneuvered their guys. I am sure you have been reading much of the same.
Here is an entry that SCREAMS at me... it is a comment on MyDD from this thread... here... scroll down to the comment from Gary Boatwright...
Killing the filibuster to save the filibuster
What am I missing? Didn't the Democrats agree not to filibuster in order to preserve their right to filibuster?
I don't think he is missing ANYTHING... I think he got it 100% right... in fact I think we avoided the `The Nuclear Option' just so we could get hit with the `Neutron Compromise' instead...
You all probably remember the Reagan arms race in the 1980s... we were staring down thousands of Russian tanks in the Fulda Gap, smack dab in the middle of the East-West German border region... There was really no way we could expect to stop a Russian Blitz if the balloon went up... Our only option would have been to lose Western Europe or `Go Nuclear'... the Russians at the time believed they could be in Paris in three weeks... with at most only a half million dead... at most.
Understandably the people of Western Europe didn't think the `Nuclear Option' - the REAL NUCLEAR OPTION was much of an improvement over the `losing Western Europe' option... after all there is something to be said about living to fight another day.
The `solution' Pentagon strategists said was to develop a `Neutron Bomb'... a `small bomb' allowing the military a nuclear option that didn't lay complete waste to everything... the neutron bomb would just kill all the people around the blast site but leave the buildings unaffected. It was called the Capitalist Bomb - kill all the people without destroying the capital...
Well I think we witnessed the political equivalent of the Neutron Bomb - killed the workings of the Senate in every way but left the institution looking `undamaged'.
And like Gary Boatwright... if I'm wrong then I'd like to know what I'm missing...