There were a couple of Disney comedies from the mid-Seventies -- The Apple Dumpling Gang and its largely uncalled for sequel The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again -- that starred Don Knotts and Tim Conway and elicited all the mediocre laughs you can imagine their pairing to entail. Basically the movies were about a couple of dim-witted bandits that had every one of their schemes blow up literally and figuratively in their faces. Who's Don and who's Tim I leave to you, but under the "leadership" of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the Democrats are looking more and more like the Dumplings. Five months into the Democratically-controlled Congress, and all I'm seeing is some bad slapstick. The ultimate moment hee-larity -- and lets hope it's ultimate rather than penultimate -- would be the Gonzales no-confidence vote. A useless dollop of turgid showmanship that in the end the Dems couldn't even get to the floor for a vote. But the Democrats have yet to meet a piece of rhetorical legislation that they didn't like. From the no-confidence vote, to non-binding resolutions against the war, to funding bills that carry easily waived benchmarks, the Dems seem to have forgotten they were sent to Washington to do more than kill trees. They were sent to end the war. You wouldn't know it from the Iraq funding bill. A bottomless barrel of pork that covered everything from emergency road repairs, to aid for farmers, to jacking the minimum wage. The only thing it didn't do was . . . oh, yeah, anything to limit the war. But Pelosi shepherded the bill to the floor, then voted against it. And I'm sure in that alternate evil Star Trek universe where Spock's got a goatee, that all makes sense. If only we lived in that alternate evil Star Trek universe where Spock's got a goatee. The line on Pelosi's busting of the "Hastert rule" is that money was running out for the troops. But that was the point: money was running out to FUND THE WAR and the Pentagon would have to appropriate for WITHDRAWAL. I mean, that was the soap we were sold last election, wasn't it? Then there's Reid promising us that on the next go-round of war funding the Dems are gonna "hold the president's feet to the fire." Sounds muy macho. But that redundant dialogue's got the ring of Groundhog Day (not a crappy 70s Disney comedy). The Dems are going to do it over and over and over until they get this leadership thing right. Right being: not going down like inebriate prom queens drunk on the resolve of President Bush. And that's the cut that kills: here we've got this cat who makes Coolidge look competent, and no matter how badly Bush and his Neo-Con cronies keep stinking up the joint the Dems do him one better. Or one worse. Bush is like a baller trying to shave points to lose the game, and the Dems still can't get across the goal line. In five months all they've managed to do is sink the Congressional approval rating below the president's. By November of '08 the Democrats will be lucky to still exist as a party. And it would all be vaguely humorous -- in a crappy 70s Disney comedy kinda way -- if we as a people were not so desperately in need of real leadership that's resolve to stand firm is tempered with the ability to reason. Surely there must be some somewhere. Tell me again: how long before Unity '08 announces their ticket?
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