There are hawks of war, dogs of war and, alas, as always, the jackals of war. You can see them coming with their lazy eyes, cackling grins, bloody lips and long teeth. The eve of war is literally an 
electric time, pregnant with fear, hope, edgy eagerness, uncertainty and manic energy. You’ll always find people who want to grab some of that swirling energy and exploit it for some cynical purpose. Like Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, it would seem.
As you know, a few days ago Senate Minority Tom Daschle told a union audience that he regretted that the president had “failed so miserably at diplomacy that weâre now forced to war.”
This was an uncharacteristically frank remark from a congressional leader on the eve of war. But it has the saving grace of being true — which is always a nice thing. I don’t know that better diplomacy would have avoided war. But it’s unquestionably true that the president’s repeated diplomatic foul-ups, goofs and course-corrections got us into a very bad situation and forced us into war on a very poor geo-political footing. I’m extremely happy to see that Daschle has crisply refused to retreat from that statement one bit.
That is especially so in the face of opportunistic grabs from across the aisle. There have been all manner of nasty comments from Republicans, criticizing Daschle, calling on him to apologize, and so forth. And that’s fine. Anyone can criticize, just as Daschle has criticized the president. (We won’t even get into the fact that many of these self-same Republicans said almost identical things when Bill Clinton sent American troops into battle.) But then comes Dennis Hastert, head of operations in the other body, who says that Daschle’s “comments may not undermine the president as he leads us into war, and they may not give comfort to our adversaries, but they come mighty close.”
Like I said, he’s pulling some of that awful energy out of the air and using it to score a few cheap points — the Speaker of the House suggesting that the Democratic leader in the other body may be giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Almost needless to say, Senator Daschle is a Vietnam-era vet, Air Force intelligence, if I remember correctly. Hastert, during the same years, was otherwise occupied.
