Twitch
Democrats, newly in control of Congress, may jettison many of Bush's domestic proposals and have pledged aggressive oversight of Iraq spending. But Democratic leaders have promised not to cut off funding for the troops.
(via a Reuters article on Mt. Doom's proposed
orgy of corruptionbudget.)
Where to begin (aside from pounding my head against the table)?
- If the Stupid Party was going to support the troops, they wouldn't be underwriting keeping them in the utter hell Iraq has become. You don't have to walk very far to see that the Evil Party is not adequately providing for the troops in Iraq.
- Very little of the additional Pentagon funding will actually make it to The Troops™. There's no profit in providing for the troops, you see. Building bases (with contract labor that good friends of the B*sh junta bill out at several thousand dollars a day, of course) makes money, as does just wrapping up palletfuls of US$100 bills and then just losing them, but if you actually have to supply the troops you have to spend some of that windfall actually purchasing something, which, even if it's worm-infested condemned rations, cuts into the profits.
- If you say you're not going to cut off funding for the troops, you're just going to encourage the Coward in Chief; by this measure, every additional boot shoved onto the ground in That Paradise That Is Occupied Iraq means additional money that can be shoveled into the bank accounts of the sociopaths who set up this whole disaster just so they could have a clear path to the US treasury.
If the Democratic Party cared about the troops, they'd zero the entire military budget today and not even talk about restoring funding until those poor bastards started to arrive back in the United States. Anything else can be filibustered (thanks, of course, to the Democratic Party not being smart enough to maneuver the Evil Party into abolishing filibuster any time during the last two years.) Of course this would mean that the Democratic Party would have to start listening to voices other than the parasitic group of courtiers who run the A-list parties inside the Washington beltway, and I can understand why it would be more important to get into the right parties than to, oh, perhaps take into consideration the political health of this pathetic second-rate empire I'm condemned to live in.
I'll mark this down as yet another thing that the Stupid Party will have to do before I support them again. And given that they aren't trying to ram an anti-torture bill through, I don't think I'll be bothering to hold my breath waiting for that day to come.
(link to the Reuters article via Arthur Silber)