Elizabeth Dole came out against the surge yesterday and she joins Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Domenici, John Warner, Gordon Smith, and Chuck Hagel as Republican senators who have decided that the surge isn't going to work.
How is President Bush responding.
Of course, he sent Stephen Hadley up to Capital Hill on a "scouting mission" to sound out Republican senators about the war. That's right, the president is now scouting the Republicans as if they were an opposing baseball team, the political opposition, or an enemy army.
Why isn't President Bush friends with Republican senators. Evidently, the Bush administration has been just as high-handed and demeaning in their dealings with Republican office holders as they've been with Democrats.
And Bush's underlying strategy with Republicans in the Senate is the same as with the Democrats. He's setting up a game of chicken where he's daring the Republicans to vote with the Democrats. First, he dared the Democrats to cut off war funding because polls showed that voters did not want resolutions to end war funding.
However, when the Dems caved, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi found out the hard way that cutting off funding was much more popular than the war itself. They're still taking a beating for it.
Now President Bush is daring Republicans to support Democratic resolutions. And it might work for a while. Congressional Republicans have been pushed into a box where anything they do will be unpopular with big constituencies. Supporting President Bush and the war makes them anathema to 2/3rds of the public while opposing the surge ticks off their core conservative support.
But President Bush could also find himself daring Republicans to override his vetoes.
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I've said it before, the Bush Administration is the gang that can't shoot straight. Instead of reasonable negotiations about how to proceed in pulling our men and women out of the Iraq quagmire, they, as you put it Ric, play chicken with the entire Congress. The President has lost all credibility, and the world worries that another war will be waged in Iran in the name of regime change.Presidential advisers like the Vice President continue to encourage a policy of aggression. The President says one thing, but the Vice President says all options are on the table. The American people now know they have been lied to all along. Congress now knows, on both sides of the aisle that they were given false information before they voted to give this President his "war powers". The world is weary over the war in Iraq. And the Administration still insists on playing children's games with people's lives. How pathetic to squander the youth of our nation for personal vanity and monetary gain. The issues of the Middle East are inextricably interconnected. This is not a place to play games. The whole region is a tinderbox and this Administration is not helping. Our Middle East policy should be the pursuit of peace, demanding diplomacy aimed at achieving peace through social and economic justice for all. It is the kind of vision the whole world has passionately embraced before...when the world believed the United States could stand taller than any problem and person in the region. The path to peace should be littered with pages and pages of negotiation, not booby trapped by inflammatory rhetoric and people unwilling to listen. Particularly disturbing is that the President and the Vice President are using the same war speeches from 2002. They are just replacing the name of the country, Iraq, with Iran; but this time, the world has noticed and so have the majority of members of the House and the Senate Democrats and Republicans. And they don't like it. And they know that we do not have the resources, either in sheer man-power or dollars to unilaterally invade another Middle Eastern country. People and nations listen to that inflammatory rhetoric from our President and Vice President and worry about a world careening towards another war. There is no doubt that America needs a thoughtful and coherent foreign policy concerning both Iraq and Iran. We ought to talk to all parties, for starters. We don't need to merely change the rhetoric of the White House. We need to abandon the administration's view that America can just shoot its way to peace anywhere there is a problem in the world. With a Democratic majority, albeit a slim one in the Senate, Congress must reassert its role as a coequal branch of government that will exercise its constitutional duty to ensure that the administration does not run off on its own to go to war. The House and the Senate need to declare that the days of runaway rhetoric by the administration are over. And, Congress must take the administration's threat of another war off the table and replace it with America's true belief that we view war as unimaginable and unacceptable. Enough playing chicken. GAME OVER..
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