Yesterday our Senators missed obvious opportunities to call out Rumsfeld on the Iraq debacle.
Slate:
Rumsfeld replied, "The plan is to prevent a civil war and, to the extent one were to occur, to have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to."
That's not a plan, and Rumsfeld must know it. He even, wittingly or not, left an opening in his reply--Iraqi security forces will deal with it, "to the extent they are able to"--that any high-school debater would have plowed through with gusto. "To what extent are they able to?" would have been one decent follow-up.
But nobody followed up.
This has got to stop, and if no one else is going to do it, then we ought to take some action.
Our Senators get blasted every time they stand up for themselves, make a point, and challenge authority. They get blasted by the right wing and by the press. But since we let it slide, they're being conditioned for weakness.
I think that Kossacks and others in the blogosphere and netroots need to take on a campaign to hassle our Senators every time they take a slide instead of standing up for open debate and loyal opposition. We need to start building their backbone by enforcing consequences if they fail. We need party whips and more partisanship, not less.
We can start by calling yesterday's spineless senators and giving them hell for being such weaklings. But what we really need is to organize into an efficient coalition for catching weakness and calling them on it.
Or does the Senate Democrat Keep Your Head Down master plan have merit that I'm not seeing ???