Bush led a new phase in his scramble to survive recently with a Nixonian speech accusing Democrats, who have finally begun to call out his dishonest pre-war Iraq hysteria campaign, of undercutting US troops and treason of The Motherland.Yesterday, Dick Cheney crawled out from his undisclosed location, to follow up the beginning of this new but familiar-seeming smear campaign with a
speech claming "The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone - but we're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history"
Today, not only does a heretofore publicly invisible, but influential Democratic House committee chair not only gives Cheney's speech the contempt it deserves, pointing out that ""people with five deferments" don't have much street cred to call anyone unpatriotic. But more importantly than that, he makes also makes a public and very clear call for, essentially, the rapid cessation of the war in Iraq.
Republicans will try to brush this guy away with the rest, but as a highly decorated vietnam veteran, he deserves more attention than Dick Cheney, and more importantly as the leading
Appropriations Committee House Democrat, he's in the position to lead an open assault on the war's funding - the only tool Congress has ever successfully used to restrain an unshamable White House.
This guy is not "low-hanging fruit" for the anti-war crowd. What we can learn from this is that if we can take back the House in 2006, the Iraq war is quite likely to come to a rapid end, President be damned.
I'd also like to mention, as lightly as possible, that the NYT could have buried this on page 10 or not published it at all, but they didn't. If we're going to bash them when they screw up, I will give them credit when due.