Thursday, March 29, 2007

Senate Iraq supplemental, the minimum wage, and the President

Lost in all the discussion about the vote to end the war and bring our troops home, which was tied to the emergency funding for the war in Iraq was the fact that the minimum wage got tied it to it too.

Which is a very smart move. The President has already threatened a veto of the spending, since it mandates that troops come home by spirng of '08. Americans overwhelmingly are against the surge, they don't think it will do what the President said it would, and they don't trust the President to do anything right. So he's already under a lot of pressure to cooperate, which he has of course, refused to do.

If he vetoes that bill, he'll be forever tied to the failed war, and his refusal to cooperate to end it with dignity. He'll also be tied to the failure to raise the minimum wage.

Lots of other comentators have noted that people whose support for the war is based on the "If we fail, it will be the WORST THING OF ALL TIME" theory, they often overlook one fact. We don't have competent people in charge who can pull this off, we have George Bush & Co. You can hope and pray that they'll see the light and start acting like professionals. Like a grizzled old Marine once told me

"Shit in one hand, wish in the other hand. See which one fills up first."

I have no idea what that means (and the visual is disturbing), but what I think that Marine was saying is that hoping for something isn't the same thing as having that hope come true. Wishing that we had adults in charge won't put them in charge at this point. We had that chance, it was the 2004 elections. People chose poorly.

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