Charlie Wilson, John Murtha: The Ties That Bind

The New York Times:

The death of former Representative Charlie Wilson of Texas is the loss of the second legendary member of the House Appropriations Committee in a week, coming just days after his one-time colleague, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, passed away.

The pair had a connection that goes far deeper than their expertise at playing the inside game in Congress to full advantage for themselves and their pet interests.

Read the whole story: The New York Times

Comments

[charles77]

02:28 PM on 02/12/2010

Charlie Wilson was a man bigger than life who lived it very very well.
http://strategicthought-charles77.blogspot.com/2010/02/charlie-wilson-was-man-bigger-than-life.html

[Good Reason News]

01:59 AM on 02/12/2010

No kidding, didn't they make a major motion picture about this?

[Uosdwis]

10:12 PM on 02/11/2010

We've all seen those TV shows or movies where you know EXACTLY what is going to happen to a rogue politician or CIA bigwig, but the news report or headline says "So-and-so died of a heart attack/car crash." We'll never know if that is what happened here..

[charles77]

07:07 PM on 02/11/2010

And so the circular firing squad begins…

Charlie Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, a man who spent his whole life, fighting for the poor, the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, died yesterday.

When he was a boy he had a dog he loved and a neighbor who was a local politician.
The neighbor didn’t like Charlie’s dog doing “his business” in his beloved yard.
One night the man left some meat filled with crushed glass for Charlie’s dog.
Charlie spent the next night cradling his dying dog in his arms.
The next night he pored gasoline on the man’s yard and burned it.
When the man was up for reelection, Charlie went to the poor part of town and spent the whole Election Day telling them what happened to his dog and carrying them to the polls in his pickup.

The next day when the man lost the election, Charlie knocked on his door, looked him in the eye, and told him, “don’t kill anymore dogs”.

Those same poor people became Charlie’s base when he was elected and he always fought for them.

And so of course the Progressives couldn’t wait to trash him in death.

READY, AIM, FIRE!

And may whatever God you worship have mercy on your souls…

[MrMostly]

01:28 PM on 02/11/2010

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Murtha both instrumental in the secret funding against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Mr. Wilson and Mr. Murtha die within days of the other.
hmmmmm...........

[CaptainSunshine]

10:03 AM on 02/11/2010

I don't want to speak ill of the dead, BUT don't we have these two to thank for Bin Laden? Were they not funding these groups to fight against the Soviets?

[trishinpitt]

01:49 PM on 02/18/2010

Part of Charlie WIlson's "War" was to fund the recovery of Afghanistan. After pouring billions into the war effort, he asked that we spare a few million more to build hospitals, roads, schools, and infrastructure to help the devastated country start over.... he was told nobody cared anymore and he couldn't get the money....

There was a great quote from Charlie WIlson they showed at the end of the movie that summed it up pretty well....

"These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we f u ck ed up the endgame."

[outnow]

09:58 AM on 02/11/2010

The idea was that any religious group was better than the godless communists. The US got what it prayed for - a group of religious extremists that metastasized into a global network.

When the end justifes the means, but the means themselves are unprincipled, the operation must be accomplished covertly. No one has to accept responsibility for the cycle of violence. The battle is won but the war is lost.

So long as you are doing it for god, everything is "justified."

One man's "freedom fighters" are another man's terroristas. That's why a friendly dictator is better than a left-wing government because the dictator will buy armaments and privatize a developing countries resources to "friendly" Wall Street interests.

Dems are the flip side of the neocons because they have to appear "tough on communism and terroristas" to fund the war machine. Murtha and Wilson exemplified this delusion.

[BlackJAC]

09:44 AM on 02/11/2010

Apparently the guys who wrote this piece didn't see the movie where that fact had been established: since Charlie's constituents had no porkbarrel requests, he could vote yes on other people's legislation and racked up a whole slew of IOUs in the process, including getting Murtha out of hock with the Ethics Committee.

"Everyone knows I'm on the opposite side of that issue."
"What, ethics?"
"Uh, yeah!"

[BlueSkyPilot]

09:00 AM on 02/11/2010

I guess the fact that we are still struggling with an armed conflict in Afghanistan is proof positive that "You Can't Take It With You!"

[Alhitch]

08:51 AM on 02/11/2010

Murtha was the face of the democrat party....greedy, corrupt and power hungry.

[BlackJAC]

09:29 AM on 02/11/2010

And you wish you were one of them.

[freemarketcapitalism]

08:37 AM on 02/11/2010

“if Democrats were still like Charlie Wilson, I would still be a Democrat.”

[respected]

08:34 AM on 02/11/2010

Tin foil hat time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They died in similar time periods. OMG

[tbone99]

08:29 AM on 02/11/2010

How interesting that both died the same week .

[BlackJAC]

09:46 AM on 02/11/2010

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died the exact same day.

[rougebaisers]

08:19 AM on 02/11/2010

Today we have the party of NO that will only say yes to more for the greed merchants and to hell with the rest, and the party of DOH that cannot figure out how to get anything done for the American people. The only good Washington politician now serving in DC is an Unemployed politician.

[heathcoat57]

09:31 AM on 02/11/2010

So Wilson and Murtha armed the Taliban in Afghanistan.

[KeysE2S]

10:03 AM on 02/11/2010

And here we see the typical lack of comprehension inherent in your average bagger Newt-fan.

The problem wasn't the fact the we helped the Afghans take back their country (something that Reagan was more than happy to take credit for, BTW). The problem was that we didn't help them rebuild it after the Soviets left.

[posercom]

04:14 AM on 02/11/2010

This is to alert the public that Pumapac.org has engaged in the unethical practise of completely altering a comment made by me, as to falsely incriminate me and to deceive Puma members into believing I was confessing to something I absolutely was not. After my statement was deviously altered I was then cut off from any further commenting. I had been working on "Prowls" with Pumapac since just after the Denver convention. It is sad to see that radical men haters and anti-Catholic Bigots have alienated all rational thinking members. The comment that was altered was under the 2-06-2010 aticle, "Dead Woman Buried in Obama Shirt." You can see my comment on #38 and the toxic discourse which followed until my grossley altered comment #79.