ABC News is reporting that, in an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced that Democrats will not block funding for President Bush's plan to escalate the war in Iraq:
Sawyer: As we sit here right now, 3,500 troops are moving in. That's the first of the surge. It has begun. Fifty-one percent of the American people say they want Congress to stop the surge. Money is the method at hand to do that.
Are you going to move to cut off funding for troops going into Iraq as part of the surge?
Pelosi: Democrats will never cut off funding for our troops when they are in harm's way, but we will hold the president accountable. He has to answer for his war. He has dug a hole so deep he can't even see the light on this. It's a tragedy. It's a stark blunder.
I'm appalled, but not surprised.
While the GOP has spent the last four years cheerleading the Iraq misadventure, the Democrats have been trying to decide whether they are for or against the war, and if they're against it, whether they're willing to do anything about it, especially if opposing the war might make the D.C. Heathers call them names.
Of course, since January 2003, the Democrats have been able to say that, as the minority party in the Senate and House, there's nothing they can do about the war, anyway.
The American people have, of course, been way ahead of Congressional Democrats. We, the people, have been against this war for well over a year now. And many of us thought that in voting the GOP out of office last November, we were voting to end the war. After all, a Democratic Congress, with the power of the purse, could end this war simply by refusing to fund it.
But that will never happen...as anyone who was paying careful attention to Democratic waffling on Iraq over the last four years could have predicted. Pelosi's interview merely confirms what the Democratic non-response to the Iraq disaster has long suggested.
So expect more handwringing and more dry powder from the Democrats, more unphotographed body bags containing U.S. troops, more mass slaughter of innocent Iraqis as the situation there spirals out of control.
Of course, as Pelosi says, the situation is a "stark blunder" and "a tragedy." But with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, this blunder and tragedy is not just Bush's responsibility. There can be no more excuses. From here on out, this is clearly the Democrats' war, too, so long as they continue to fund it. Unfortunately, our political system will make it very hard for the people to hold both major parties accountable.