Dems Capitulate: Bowing, Scraping, Caving

I was going to write a post about the DC Democrats surrendering to Bush AGAIN, but why bother when Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has already expressed what I want to say:

Democrats show Beltway "strength," avoid being depicted as weak (updated below)

In the world of the Beltway pundit, Bush Dog Representative, and Democratic strategist, this is how Democrats prove how "strong" and tough they are and avoid being demonized as "weak" and "soft"; this is all just from today:

From The Hill:

From The Washington Post:

From CNN:

From The Hill:

And this passage from the CNN article -- in which Democrats try to explain that they didn't completely capitulate in every single way possible -- is one of the most pity-inducing of the year, and there is a very healthy competition for that distinction:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democratic lawmakers and staffers privately say they're closing in on a broad budget deal that would give President Bush as much as $70 billion in new war funding. The deal would lack a key provision Democrats had attached to previous funding bills calling for most U.S. troops to come home from Iraq by the end of 2008, which would be a significant legislative victory for Bush.

Still, Democrats are trying to sell $70 billion in new war funding as a partial victory for them. They point out that while the final numbers are still in flux during intense private negotiations, Bush is likely to get far less money than he originally requested.

"What is for sure is he will not get all $200 billion," said one senior Democratic lawmaker. "Whatever number it is, it is much less than what the president asked for. For the first time in this war, he has received less than his request."

But senior administration officials privately say they expect to be able to get at least of the rest of the president's $200 billion request passed through Congress next year.

For Congressional Democrats, the "victory" they are touting is that they are only giving Bush $70 billion for the war now, and they won't give him the other $130 billion he is demanding until they return in a few weeks. They really showed him.

Read the rest of Greenwald's post.

I'd love to require all the cowardly Dems taking this path to irrelevance to walk precincts and talk to potential Dem voters from now until at least the New Year. It would be fascinating, to say the least, to witness how they'd go about convincing ordinary people that they're doing anything at all to express the will of the people and stand up to Bush's eternal war machine. Maybe they'd wake up and get the big picture if they had to face the insults and door slamming that occurs so often these days when activists try to make a case for the Dem cause and candidates. They'd find out fast, as so many of us have, that there's next to nothing to "sell" people when we're trying to get folks excited about the Party.

Bush and his cronies played this one out perfectly. A while back Bush came right out and said that he intended to "fix" things so that the next President, regardless of who they were, would be forced to deal with Iraq on his terms, not theirs. Clearly the aim has been to saddle the next administration and the American people with a situation in Iraq that would make a timely exit next to impossible. And if and when an exit ever comes, you can guess who'll be blamed for the "failure."

Of course this tactic has the added benefit of further bankrupting government, thus making it next to impossible to do anything to effectively address our problems related to domestic spending of any kind. This, in turn, pretty much guarantees that government at every level will increasingly turn to "privatization" to perform what governments can no longer afford to do on their own. This inevitably leads to higher, not lower, costs to the taxpayers, but it does provide opportunities for the quick, if illusory, fixes of which politicos are so fond.

Meanwhile the DC Dems keep bragging about their "new direction" and touting their extraordinary achievements since we helped them take back the Congress. Can you remember what they are? Well, they did manage to raise the minimum wage to a level it should have been a decade or so ago. They keep passing SCHIP legislation and resubmitting it to Bush for his veto, something they're unaccountably afraid to do with other bills like those on Pentagon and war funding, energy, FISA and torture. They keep investigating scandals and issuing subpoenas, but nothing tangible ever seems to result from these efforts. I guess they think the publicity is enough.

I'm very tired of all the sound and fury signifying nothing, aren't you? All form, no substance. All rhetoric, no action. All bluster, no follow through. Most of all, no courage of their convictions -- if they have any left after so many years of putting their reelection and fundraising goals before the needs of the nation.