So, Dingy Harry Reid is trying a publicity stint. Fox’s Major Garrett: [1]
Speaking on the Senate floor, Reid said Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States and attempts to block legislation calling for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq will be met with a hardball response.
“We’re going to work on this amendment until we get an up or down vote on it,” he said. Senate Republican leaders, alerted to Reid’s plans on Monday, said they have the votes to keep the president’s surge policy in place, at least for now, and called Reid’s up-all-night gambit a stunt that wouldn’t change any minds.
Senior Democratic leadership aides acknowledged that Reid’s all-nighter — complete with roll-away beds — is meant to draw public attention to GOP demands that any changes to Iraq policy carry a 60-vote majority. “Is this a publicity stunt? Yes,” a senior Democratic aide told FOX News. “This is the only way we know to highlight their complete ignorance of the will of the people!”
The problem with the senior Democratic aide and his assessment of the situation, is that given that Congress has a lower level rating than does president Bush, their assessment of precisely what the will of the people is, is a little off.
As such, and as far as I’m concerned, let’s let the Democrats hang themselves on this one. Let’s let them generate all the publicity that they possibly can. I’m quite serious, here. In the end, the Republicans… and the country as a whole… can only benefit, from the exposure of the Democrats and their cowardly “cut and run” strategy. They’ll never get it passed, anyway.
Republicans predict that amendment will fall well short of the 60 votes required and probably attract no more than 55 votes, possibly fewer. Other non-binding policy changes are expected as well, but nothing is expected to garner the required 60 votes. “The much-discussed Republican revolt has yet to materialize,” a senior GOP aide said.
Update I: (Bit)
Michelle [2]notes the same story and suggests…
f you haven’t read Michael Yon’s latest [3] and Bryan Preston’s latest [4] on Iraq, now’s the time.
Quite. But of greater import, I think is one of the folks in her comments section:
Irrelevance is a bitter pill to swallow, and can lead to meaningless irrational behavior in order to gain attention.
Update II: (David L)
Glenn Reynold, Instapundit [5], is linking to “Senator Webb announces imminent victory in Iraq [6].”
I predict that this is another politcal football, Dirty Harry will not get over the goal line.
Update III: (Bit)
Something I noted, on the New York Times website [7], deserves a brief discussion within this context:
While President George W. Bush continues to pursue his Iraq strategy, and Senate Democrats and Republicans debate the direction of the nation’s war policy, Americans persist in their negativity about how the war is going, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last Monday through Friday.
Three-quarters of those polled said the war was going badly while just one-quarter said it was going well. This level of negative public opinion has been relatively constant since January.
The party divide on the war remains clear. Republicans are conflicted – they are evenly split, with half saying their president’s war is going well and half saying it is going badly. Democrats, however, overwhelmingly hold a negative assessment of the war, with 92 percent saying the war is going badly.
So, let’s examine this closely.
If, as the article suggests, the level of negative opinion has been relatively stable since the beginning of the year, it means that for all the efforts of the times itself, and for that matter the remainder of the supposedly mainstream media, and the negativity that they’ve been projecting about Iraq, President Bush, etc., and Republicans in general, they’ve not managed to whip up any additional negativity on the part of the electorate, in that area. And boy, have they been trying.
Oddly, the area where the numbers are going down, at a staggering rate, and perhaps because of those efforts, is approval of the Democrats in Congress. When even the Times admits this amount of polling losses, in whatever venue, it’s an indication of some earthshaking going on.
Think about this; the Democrats have been resisting going to the mat with their “cut and run thinking on Iraq”, because they no that doing so would be extraordinarily unpopular with the American people. (David Obey, call your office) They resisted the pressure from their extreme left, to put any teeth into their calls for giving up the fight. They know Americans hate a loser. They remember well, how they took it on the chin, following Vietnam.
Thing is, they’ve already lost all the support of mainstream America. They can’t get any worse, there. The only solid demographics they had remaining, was the hard left, and so the big loss of polling numbers for them right now is the hard left because of their unwillingness to adopt the whacko policies their extreme left has been calling for.
So, what we are seeing in this publicity stunt that Harry Reid and the Democrats are pushing on us, is a desperate attempt to turn things around, numbers wise. The Democrats are in very serious trouble, here, or they’d not be trying this stunt. That trouble takes on larger proportions when one considers momentum going into the next election.