Monday, December 24, 2007

It's So Easy!



My Man Chris Floyd over at Empire Burlseque has a post up about Chris Dodd's threatened filibuster of Harry and Dick's FISA "Reform" Bill.

In it, he makes the very cogent point that, all things considered, it was remarkably easy to derail this freight train, with the implication that all along, had there been any reasonable opposition to Bushevik misrule, many of the horrors we've lived through these last seemingly endless years couldn't -- or at least wouldn't -- have happened.

Where was Chris Dodd before now? And where will he be when Harry re-introduces the bill in January?

It's not just Dodd of course. Ask where any senator has been.

Floyd puts it this way:

For the moment, I'll skip the obvious caveats that bristle all around this minor victory, and just make this observation: look how very little it takes to throw some sand in the wheels of the vast authoritarian machine created by Bush and his very willing Democratic partners (and predecessors). All it took to turn aside the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of the amnesty bill was a single senator who refused, this once, to go along for the ride, and the slightest bit of heat on Reid for his deceitful kowtowing to the presidential tyrant.


Then he contrasts it with the shameful turn around to fund Bush's ongoing wars without strings:

As we noted yesterday, even the slightest bit of moxie can gum up the works for the war-loot-and-tyranny machine. But this week's "hero," Chris Dodd, was nowhere to be found when the new war money was on the line. He was back on the campaign trail, with his fellow presidential aspirants from the Senate: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe "Ethnic Cleansing? Hell, Yeah!" Biden. Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy made fine speeches, and Feingold did offer a troop-withdrawal amendment -- but again, there was no filibuster, no sand thrown in the gears. The bill had been constructed -- by the Democratic leadership, which is in charge of the Senate, after all -- in a way to make it almost impossible for the politicians to derail it: it was tied to an omnibus spending bill whose defeat could have risked a Gingrichian shut-down of some government services. ("If you don't vote for this war, poor children are going to go hungry and the national parks will close!")


The answer, of course, is to abolish the Senate.

Easy!

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