It looks like Sen. Joe Manchin is on a justification tour, offering his latest excuse -- following a statement released on Friday -- for being the only Democrat to vote against cloture on the Defense Authorization bill, putting what may be the final nail in the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" coffin:
I sat on two meetings of armed services both telling me, ‘it should be on our time table, not legislative time table.’ So I voted to let the military have it on their timetable….I made a decision based on that. [...]
What they were saying was, ‘we got fronts, we got a war in Afghanistan, we got 50 percent of our troops deployed, can you not wait until we get out of this?’
Oh sure. Let's hold off on ending an official policy of discrimination in the U.S. military until we remove ourselves from a never-ending quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan ... where we're fighting to for the freedom of all.
And in other DADT news, among those who aren't waiting for peace in our time before voting for equal rights:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) — the lead sponsor of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal in the House — have just announced that they will introduce a House version of the stand-alone DADT repeal measure offered by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) after the Senate failed to proceed to the National Defense Authorization Act.
Of course the Congressional Christmas break -- that starts for all other Americans in 12 days -- is still scheduled to begin on Friday, so we shall soon see if the repeal of DADT is the final casualty of the 111th.