A little unclear on the concept
Anti-war Senate Democrats Tuesday plotted a new showdown with US President George W. Bush over Iraq, but admitted they had erred by making supporters think they could end the war.
.
.
.
"We set the bar too high," he said, noting that under Senate rules, Democrats needed 60 votes in the 100 seat chamber to thwart Republican blocking tactics.
You know, this might have been a spiffy argument when the Democrats were in the minority and didn't have their grubby little fingers on the budget, but one of the spiffy things about being in the majority is that if you don't want the bill to see the floor the bill won't see the floor, and any blocking tactics are only as effective as the PR campaign behind them.
If the Democrats wanted to end the war, they'd defund it. The Pentagon has 3 months of money already budgetted, and that's ample time to fire all the parasitic mercenaries and withdraw from the country. The Republicans can do all the "blocking tactics" they might want, but if every bill that comes to the floor has had war funding surgically removed, none of those blocking tactics will put one penny of it back in.
And, furthermore, if there are any quisling Democrats in the Senate caucus, I'd think it would be much more productive to force them to show their true colors, so they could be tossed out on their ears in the 2008 primaries (this is assuming, of course, that they don't turn and run on the CfL ticket with the explicit approval of the Democratic leadership.)
But I guess that when it comes to the choice between acting as the majority party in the House and Senate, or grasping for that elusive 23% approval rating, the sensible thing (at least according to the pack of Evil Party toadies who claim to be the Washington press) is to lunge for the approval rating, because, hey, that keeps B*sh's approval rating above that of the rest of the government.
I'd like to meet the DLC consultant who managed to sell the Democratic caucus on the idea that repeated craven surrender (and whining about it) was the path to a lasting electoral majority. I'd have to shake their hand and complement them on their spectacular job of neutering the Democratic party, because there comes a point where you can only gaze in awe at how efficiently someone can teach a collection of (allegedly) grown-up people to stab themselves in the back so that their enemies won't tire their knife hands.