The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just passed a bill to give arms to Syrian rebels, over the known objections of administration officials, mainly the President and Dempsey, and they passed the damm vote 15-3. Not seven close. These bastards have hit the administration from the right flank consistently on middle-east policy, whether its Iran, Israel, and now Syria. The chief hawk is Menendez, who openly critizes obama for not being more hawkish on a whole range of Middle-East policy, but whats sickening is a)he gets almost unanimous support from Senate Dems and b)they routinely try to pass legislation that explicitly states they're forcing the presidents hand. These guys don't have any of the intelligence, and instead of being the backstop to administration excesses in intervention, they are doing the opposite and are becoming activist in setting policy, even war policy.
But back to the title of this thread...when the hell are the FPers gonna call these guys out and put pressure on them. When you have basically 85-90% of the DEMOCRATIC caucus routinely to the right of the friggin Obama administration on middle-east policy, thats a problem that needs some goddamm attention. And lets not even begin with how they've pretty much skated by without nary a peep of criticism for their complete demogagory on Guantoma. We rightly criticize the administration for their cowardice, but reading Daniel Klaidman's book Kill or Capture and you will be absolutes disgusted with almost all Senate Democrats.
He talks in great detail about how the administration was completely blindsided when in the spring of 2009, at a democratic caucus lunch, almost the entire caucus blew up at David Axelrod for the president giving republicans Gitmo closure as a weapon to demagogue and for making them have to take tough votes on this issue. You even had liberals like Boxer objecting. Or how about Schumer attacking the administration for trying KSM in NY, or Harry Reid going on the Senate floor proudly declaring he would NEVER allow any terrorists on US soil. Again and again these guys do this crap and pretty much are absolved of all responsibility.
Let me make myself clear...this is not a get out of jail card for Obama on many of these issues. He has CORRECTLY been criticized for his failure on Gitmo and counter-terrorism policies. But I'm just sick and tired of Senate Democrats getting away with pounding their chests like Neo-cons on the floor, then coming to fundraisers and trying to pass all liberal FP critics in the past 4 years to Obama and act like they're just bystanders. I've seen them do that and we can't let that happen.
And one last message to he FPers:
You really have to stop your apathy and complete disregard of talking about Middle-East policy. I know you don't want to talking about the I-P issue, and thats fine, but right now there is a big political push to get us into Syria and have another Iraq, with that same bipartisan "consensus" forming and we've barely even mentioned it on this site. Its a disgrace.