The mistakes of the general public as they work to organize themselves politically are more fruitful than the clever plans of political strategists, a German antiwar activist once wrote. (After her parliamentary colleagues voted for a war budget, she said: "There are only two men left in our party - me and Clara Zetkin.")
Rep. Rahm Emanuel is telling Democratic party leaders to "continue to ratchet up the pressure on Bush" on Iraq. Sen. Majority Leader Reid is co-sponsoring a bill that "would cut off funding for the Iraq war within a year and set a hard deadline for withdrawing troops," a move that "will give a bright green light to other members...making it harder to satisfy the party's base with anything less than a hard timeline for withdrawal," writes Lois Romano in the Washington Post.
But check out this video on YouTube. Talk about supporting the troops! Put this woman in charge of strategic communications immediately. (Warning: younger viewers will find this particularly enchanting. There's no nudity or profanity - nothing you couldn't broadcast on the public airwaves in 2007 - but Anthony Comstock would not have approved.)
The narrator bemoans the absence of the troops from the "homeland," and her plaintive lament could not be more timely. Last Wednesday the Pentagon announced that Army deployments would be extended from 12 to 15 months (a 25% increase, for those scoring at home.) A day earlier, in typical Orwellian fashion, the president had charged that Democrats' efforts to impose a deadline for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would lead to longer deployments.
As William Bennett famously opined, "Where is the outrage?" Our soldiers and their families are expected to meekly accept the president's new orders. After all, they signed on the dotted line.
But which of them imagined, when they signed on that line, that what the president had in store for them were the longest deployments since World War II?
I gather that some of our active-duty soldiers have access to the internet. I hope that they have the opportunity to check out our modern-day Lysistrata. (Aristophanes, eat your heart out.) And I hope that at least one of these soldiers will immediately sign on to the legally protected Appeal for Redress, asking their Congressional Representative and US Senators to support the withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq.
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