They Came, They Saw, They Floundered

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They Came, They Saw, They Floundered

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A lot has been said about how President Bush is an inept fool. While
I may be persuaded to agree that he does some very foolish things both
domestically (giant health care bills and increases in school funding)
and internationally (”I looked into his eyes and saw a good man”) his
particular missteps are small compared to how inept the democrats are.

After winning back the house and senate based on, according to the
democrats, a surge of voter disapproval on Iraq. Well, here we are
almost a year after those elections swept in the democrats and not only
are we not out of Iraq (we’re winning) but they haven’t even been able
to get health care for middle class children. Here’s what President Bush has to say about all of this ineptitude:

“We’re near the end of the year, and there really isn’t
much to show for it,” Bush told reporters following a meeting with
House GOP leaders.

“The House of Representatives has wasted valuable time on a constant
stream of investigations, and the Senate has wasted valuable time on an
endless series of failed votes to pull our troops out of Iraq,” the
president said.

The democrats are focusing on a string of proposals that are going
nowhere and investigating every White House janitor to find out whether
or not that pretzel Bush choked on was made by Haliburton and delivered
in an armed convoy by Blackwater. Everything that they are consuming
their time with now is meaningless. They have pegged a lot of their
effort on passing SCHIP. This children’s health care bill is already in
existence and the president’s proposal would increase the amount of
funding it currently receives. But that’s not enough for the democrats;
I guess bipartisanship to them is the republicans surrendering on every issue.

The GOP lawmakers, all of whom had expressed interest in
a bipartisan deal on the SCHIP legislation, were furious that the
Democratic leader from Maryland had not reached out to them in a more
serious way early on. They also criticized him and Democratic Caucus
Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois for failing to stop his allies
outside Congress from running attack ads in their districts, while they
were discussing a bipartisan deal….

“They spent $1.5 million through their various shill outreach groups
attacking me and a handful of my colleagues,” Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.)
said before the Hoyer meeting, “but they did not spend five minutes to
approach me to ask for my vote.”

This us-against-them mentality has been an ongoing storyline of the
new Democratic­-controlled Congress. On the big items — Iraq, health
care and spending — party leaders have shunned compromise.

Democrats are under tremendous pressure from liberal activists to
take a hard-line approach against everything Bush. Republicans face
similar pressure from their own base to stick with the president and
prove they are serious about curtailing spending, even if it means less
cash for a popular state-run health care program for children not
covered by Medicaid.

The republicans were and are willing to compromise. No one is even
talking about keeping the program at its current levels (I say kill it,
it is the STATES-CHIP anyway). Wouldn’t it be nice to get a win every
once in a while? Well, to the left wing of the party that would be a
negatory. Anything that Bush supports must be evil; if Bush came out in
favor of puppies then PETA would come out saying they wanted pets
killed (oh wait, they’ve already done that).

Another huge misstep the democrats are making is pushing for
Rangel’s Mother of all Tax Hikes. It would increase taxes trillions of
dollars and, even though they say this particular tax plan won’t
trickle down to also taxing the poor, it will also increases taxes on
the poor. Nancy Pelosi knows this isn’t going to sell well with the
voters so she had her comment on the house floor changed to better, uh, explain what she really meant when she made her statement:

Following the unveiling of arguably the most politically
explosive domestic policy bill of the 110th Congress last Thursday,
Pelosi seemed to wholeheartedly support the tax overhaul authored by
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rangel.

“I certainly support his plan,” Pelosi (D-Calif.) said to the assembled reporters.

But when the transcript of the briefing came out, words were
inserted — highlighted by brackets — clarifying that she supported his
goal, if not his specific proposals.

The final transcript read: “I certainly support his plan [to begin tax reform.]”

The distinction is an important one. Rangel was immediately
criticized by the GOP as he announced his highly controversial tax plan
and Republicans started trying to tie the plan to Pelosi and the
Democratic leadership.

Cute. Wouldn’t it have sufficed to issue a statement correcting her
mistake? No, she had to manually go into the record and change it for
perpetuity. I’m not going to say that this is Soviet-esque because,
well, no party in America is anywhere near that bad, but it is still
underhanded and evidence of dirty politics.

Plus who is she trying to please with this? Is she just covering her
backside? That’s what it looks like. Maybe this should be a welcome
change from their heretofore mindless obedience to their kookosphere
puppet masters. It’s probably more about the former theory of covering
one’s hind quarters though.

However there is an area where the house, senate, and the White
House all agree. The only problem is that it is to their mutual and,
more importantly, to our nation’s detriment. What can they all agree
on? The Patriots winning the next Super Bowl? Probably not. But they
are all lost on LOST.

The Law of the Sea Treaty, LOST, is an international treaty that
aims at providing a system for governing the high seas. If this bill
ever became a law it would mean that we have acquiesced our sovereign
power to an unchecked international body. Senator James Inhofe puts it this way,

LOST was conceived in the late 1970s as a way of
governing all activities that occur on and beneath the surface of the
world’s oceans. The treaty’s central aims, those of defining the
corridors of water surrounding a country and standardizing the rules of
navigation through these corridors, are innocent enough and are
probably needed to govern and safeguard the ever-increasing use of the
high seas. It is for this reason that the U.S. Navy, as is often
touted, has given its endorsement of the treaty. The rules concerning
navigation, however, only act as a cover for the treaty’s true intent —
to subvert the overwhelming economic and military advantages of the
United States.

Why then would the Navy support such a treaty? Part of the
endorsement stems from the fact that the Navy is highly supportive of
the aforementioned rules of navigation. The Navy also argues, and
textually it is true, that military activities are exempted. Certainly,
if this were the case, many of the fears I have expressed would be
allayed. However, this will not prove to be the case.

“Military activities,” though exempted, are not defined in the text
of the treaty. What is military in nature to the Navy may not be
interpreted in the same manner by an international tribunal or
arbitration panel overseeing such a case. Before you know it, military
exercises would be deemed as threats against the maritime ecosystem,
stronger sonar designed to combat quieter enemy submarines would be
deemed damaging to marine wildlife, and activities conducted within the
territorial waters of another country would be intelligence or
propaganda operations, not necessarily “military.” Private contractors,
who are currently being employed to deliver military assets into areas
of operations, would also be deemed ineligible for an exemption. All of
these activities would be subject to compulsory dispute resolution
before an international tribunal.

Does this Congress, or any Congress for that matter, want to be the
one who was responsible for giving up a major source of our power? Does
the president really want to this to happen? It seems that the answer
to both these questions is yes.

Personally I don’t understand the fixation on internationalizing
everything. Has anyone taken a close look at who makes up the world?
There’s a bunch of countries whose citizens earn a couple dollars a
day, nations that are devolving into statist relics, nations that just
plain don’t know how to run a barber shop (no offense to barber shop
owners). Hopefully Senator Inhofe is able to rally enough opposition to
get this thing canned.

If he can’t rally enough opposition maybe the American people could. Some California voters were polled about what they thought about Pelosi and the democrats in congress in general.

For Pelosi, it was the first time the poll showed more
people disapproving than approving of her performance – 40 percent to
35 percent, with 25 percent having no opinion.

Other polls since 2003 have shown larger numbers of voters with no
opinion, but Pelosi always won more approval than disapproval. As
recently as March, California Democrats approved of Pelosi by a 5-to-1
ratio, DiCamillo said. Now it’s less than 2-to-1. Nonpartisan voters
also have soured on her.

Only 22 percent of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, the poll found, while 64 percent disapprove.

The six other times that congressional approval has dipped to 30
percent or below can be tied to specific events, such as the
impeachment of President Clinton or the economic downturn of the early
1990s that hit California particularly hard, DiCamillo said.

Of course republicans did worse in California but that is more ho
hum since we are a blue state (thank God I live right next to quite
possibly the reddest county in the country though). I’m not one to
easily prescribe to the tripe about how these are the most divisive
times in history (the Civil War and the actual founding of our country
come quickly to mind as being more divisive) but things do seem to be
especially polarized. Maybe politics on both sides are being ran by
stridently ideological bases. But that still just doesn’t ring true to
me. The last conservative that ran for president was in 1986. We have
few quantifiable conservatives in the house or the senate either.

On the other hand, the democrats have stridently leftist leaders in
the house, the senate and running for president. Hillary’s big “idea”
is universal health care. Mr. Rangel wants to INCREASE taxes
significantly. All types of democrat leaders go to kookosphere
conventions and pray at their alter. Yeah, Bush had some radio hosts
come to the White House but that isn’t even a public event. To sum it
all up we have one radicalized party and one party that has lost its
way.

Even though the democrat base is highly energized and radicalized it
is showing some of the same signs the republicans are showing. They are
floundering. Maybe this is what our Founders envisioned; political
parties that are perpetually frustrated. If that’s what they designed
then they are geniuses because it is frustrating everyone who pays
attention to politics today. BigT