Five days ago I published a diary here entitled Speaker Pelosi, Deny This. Please!. It begged folks in her office or otherwise in the know to put the lie to reports I had heard from friends who had spoken with her: that the House Dems plan to do exactly nothing to stop the war in Iraq this year because to try and fail would make the Democrats look weak in an election year.
Silly me.
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has the story, and he has quotes. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has evidently spent more time listening to jock-talk radio than the American people: ""We just didn't have any plays we liked down there. Sometimes you just have to play the field-position game...."
And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn't agree more. As the 4000th troop death looms and Iraq spirals deeper into misery day by day, he has no plans to raise this unpleasantness either: "We have the presidential election. Our time is really squeezed."
I know it's not surprising. I know it's so depressing that the mind kind of slides away from thinking about it and drawing conclusions. But there's something I'd like to ask you to think about. If indeed Bush and Company should at some point face judgment and penalties for what they have done in the Middle East, as many Kossacks feel, what about this shabby little Congressional tag team? Aren't they playing the role of accomplices and enablers in the hope of making political gains?
I'm not even asking you to denounce them. They aren't going to listen to us; they've got it all figured out--we've got no choice but to turn out this fall, in large numbers, or be stuck with Mr. Hundred Years' War.
What I want you to do is take some action, some independent action, to end this sucking chest wound of a war. Me, I'm extremely partial to the locally-centered, grassroots, Third Friday of every month project called the Iraq Moratorium, and recommend you check it out.
But whatever it is, do something, dammit! Let's not let depression or inertia turn us into little xeroxes of Pelosi and Reid!