Let’s party.
From The Hill …
President Bush has invited leaders of the conservative Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions to the White House Friday to discuss areas of âmutual cooperationâ in the words of one Democratic Congressional aide.
The outreach comes at a time when Bushâs image on Capitol Hill and around the country has taken a serious beating. The meeting is scheduled just two days after the Iraq Study Group is scheduled to release its findings and one day after the Senate Armed Services Committee plans to hold hearings on them.
Reps. Alan Boyd (Fla.), Dennis Moore (Kan.) and Mike Ross (Ark.) will represent the Blue Dogs, a coalition of usually southern, conservative-leaning Democrats and Reps. Joe Crowley (N.Y.), Artur Davis (Ala.), Ron Kind (Wis.), Adam Smith (Wash.) and Ellen Tauscher (Calif.) are set to represent the New Democrats, a group of business-friendly centrists, at the meeting, which the president is expected to attend.
Newsweek: “In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to ‘dismantle the militias.’ The soft-spoken Texas Democrat was an early opponent of the Iraq war and voted against the October 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade that country. That dovish record got prominently cited last week when Speaker designate Nancy Pelosi chose Reyes as the new head of the intelligence panel.”
Rosenberg: Boot Prager off National Holocaust Memorial board.
Amen.
As I mentioned a couple days ago, in a former incarnation radio yacker Dennis Prager was fairly sane. Now that he’s on his own crusade to force every member of Congress to hold a bible when they take their oath of office, I was glancing over some of his recent columns. Here’s a particularly fun one.
According to Prager, the threat of radical Islam (or, you get the sense from Prager, just plain old Islam) is greater than that of Nazism and Communism combined.
So the threat that Nazi Germany would control the European continent and from that sturdy perch dominate the world was just a warm up for the threat of al Qaida and its deracinated Jihadis.
Any respect for, or recognition of, what transpired in the ideological wars of the 20th century seems now to be collateral damage in the endlessly hyperbole that seems intrinsic to the mindset of War on Terror whackjobs.
Okay, I can’t help it. Just a bit more on Dennis Prager. MJ Rosenberg calls Prager and self-hating Jew. I wouldn’t argue with that for a moment. But somehow that phrase just doesn’t do Prager justice.
Here’s a Jew who says that no Jew should be able to serve in the US Congress unless he or she is willing to have a copy of the New Testament on hand when they take the oath of office. I’m not sure if one can appreciate this without having the context of Prager’s general sanctimony and cloying ethnic self-abnegation. But it’s hard for me not to imagine Prager as one of Jews in the Medieval Europe arguing that living in the Ghetto and maybe wearing these funny hats might actually be a good thing after all. I’ll refrain from invoking the toxic parallels of more recent vintage.
I can’t help but wonder, deep down, what he’s trying to prove to whom.
Maybe he so hates and is so frightened of Muslims that he’s willing to sell out his religion and Jewishness, to slap on a yellow badge of second class status, in the hopes that the Christians will protect him.
The guy gives Uncle Toms a bad name.
Florida’s 13th District post-election battle is heading to the House. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Bush: “country is tired of pure political bickering” on Iraq.
Can’t make this stuff up.
When you’ve got a picture like this, who really needs a caption, right?
As I wrote in the Digest this morning, the clearest sense of how bleak a state we’re in is the fact that all this report really does is state the obvious (the Iraq’s a disaster and we can’t stay there forever) in a quasi-public forum.
One other point we shouldn’t go too long without restating. With his policy of no troop increases and no troop decreases, let’s all understand that President Bush’s real policy is stasis — no ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ or escalating or withdrawing. It’s about fighting any fight, carrying any burden to keep kicking this can down the alley until January 2009 so he can say the disaster he created is someone else’s fault. That’s not hyperbole or trash talk. That’s really the policy.
So many instances where it’s hard to distinguish the real news from the stuff that shows up in The Onion. From the Post, new Congress to shelve old two day work week for a five day work week. No, not makin’ this up.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) — one of the worst from the old GOP Congress — on why working for a living is against family values: “Keeping us up here eats away at families. Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.”
Late Update: An anonymous TPM Reader responds to Rep. Kingston: “As an active duty military member Iâm pretty offended by members of congress crying about working a 5 day work week. And for Rep Kingstonâs comments about families, give me a break! How about the thousands of military marriages that have ended because of husbands and wives being deployed for a year multiple times?”