I am swelling with pride in my Democratic Party right now.
Bless John Lewis and Barbara Lee and Diane Watson and Maxine Waters for voting against this bill. Bless Pete Stark for his wacky vote of "present."
That's right. I favored the bill. But bless them. We need them. We need them to be saying, out in public, that this bill is not right, it's not enough.
And bless Baron Hill and Kirstin Gillibrand and Heath Shuler and Jason Altmire for voting for it, even at some potential political cost. We needed them and they came through.
And bless Carol Shea-Porter and John Conyers and Louise Slaughter and Ciro Rodriguez for voting for a bill about which they must have had the same misgivings that many of us share. We needed them.
And maybe even bless Jim Marshall and Jim Matheson and Gene Taylor for voting no if that's really what they had to do to keep their seats -- on the condition that if we had needed their vote, we would have had it.
And bless Nancy Pelosi and George Miller and David Obey and John Murtha for making it all happen. They cannot be thanked enough.
We needed them all. Some thoughts on what this means below.
I have a lot of apolitical friends. They do not follow the daily grind of politics. If they want to understand something like the USA scandal, they call me. Or, more often, they don't, because it's not important enough to them. They're good people. But they don't have the mutation that we have that makes us follow follow follow what is going on.
It takes a lot to break through to them. They may respond to 1 out of 1000 political headlines. The story has to be huge.
This is huge. The Democratic Party is trying to bring a halt to the war. We may not succeed -- although we might. A lot rides on the post-vote PR battle that the U.S. Petulant inaugurated with his press conference soon after the roll call -- a sure sign that he sees the significance of what has been done. We can affect that outcome.
But for a moment now, I just want to ask you to join me, no matter what your feelings about this bill, in some incredible pride.
The end of the war is now thinkable.
For you, for me, it's always been thinkable. But not to the public. It's been a diffuse aspiration, but not a realistic expectation. Now, to the public, it is thinkable. The world has changed. Even the apolitical will see it.
Bush's press conference was designed specifically to squash any such hope. He wants us to believe that the continuation of the war is inevitable. But it's not. The end of the war is thinkable. The House of Representatives joined together, left and center and right, and voted for a deadline to end the war.
I'm glad that there were only 218 votes for it. That sends a message as well, and it is not a message of weakness.
It's a message of revulsion. We who supported the bill are as revulsed as any of its opponents at giving over another $100 mbillion to this man for this insane ass-covering enterprise. We wanted to be able to pass this -- as the only means we have to impose this deadline -- without being able to endorse continuation of the war at all. 218 votes sends that message. It's the perfect number. And Waters and Watson and Lewis and Lee and Stark -- they play a critical role here. They are the reminders to the public of the Democrats' revulsion and reluctance. Their votes matter too.
We have rough days ahead. The Senate vote may be tough -- we may see a filibuster -- and we'll have to hold tough and point out that these provisions are reasonable and fair, and that if Bush wants his money he will damn well have to accept them. Those provisions are the difference between his proposal and ours. They should be the focus of any future debate. God knows that we can defend them.
Tempers will flare, interests will clash, in the battle ahead. When you hang around DKos, it's easy not to see how much of the country is neither red nor blue, but a sort of a pallid gray. But we got through to them today. We did it as a united party in which many members, on the right and left of the caucus, sacrificed for the common goal of breaking Bush's veneer of invulnerability.
He'll try to capture it back. Don't let him. Don't undersell the significance of our providing a beacon to the public of where we are going, what we are about as a party.
We are the party that is going to end this war. And God help those who stand against us.
And God bless those who have worked so hard to send this message to our country and to posterity. We are the Democratic Party, we are going to end this war, and we will do what we need to get 218 votes to do it.