The coverage over the weekend will presumably make this crystal clear -- but, well, maybe not, given how absurdly bad the media record on Iraq for the past three years has been. So let me try to shed one small light on the matter -- there will, I hope, be many others, and brighter.
Here is the sequence of events leading up to Friday night's despicably wacky Bizarro World vote in Congress:
(1) John Murtha, a respected Democratic congressmen, called, earlier this week, for an American pullout from Iraq within six months. Murtha is a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran and a longtime supporter of the military -- and of the Iraq war; his position seemed motivated chiefly by sorrow and outrage that the U.S. armed forces have been placed in an impossible position by the Bush administration's policies.
(2) The Republican response to Murtha was to accuse him of cowardice and of aiding al-Qaida.
(3) Today, Republicans in Congress proposed and, with no debate, forced a vote on a bill calling for the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. That is not at all what Murtha, who said U.S. forces should leave "at the earliest practicable date," advocated. It is plainly quite opposite to what the people who proposed the bill want, either. (Isn't there some sort of parliamentary rule that says that if you propose and sponsor a bill you have to, like, vote for it? Maybe not, but there should be!)
The bill was proposed by the Republicans expressly to discredit Murtha, only they didn't have the guts or the decency to write a bill that accurately reflected the congressman's position; they had to misrepresent it, just as their party had to misrepresent the facts to persuade the American people to support this war in the first place.
The bill was not only what Democrats called it -- a stunt; it was a deeply dishonest abuse of our legislative process. This seems to be what we have to look forward to from a Republican Party that is losing its grip on the levers of state, with right-wingers and moderates falling out and both trying to distance themselves from an increasingly unpopular president and an administration that is coming apart at the seams, leaking corruption and criminality.
Americans and Iraqis are continuing to die every day thanks to decisions our government made two and a half years ago. Whether you support or oppose the war, whether you agree or disagree with Murtha, you may, perhaps, share my sense of disgust at today's tableaux of congressional theater of the absurd. We have crossed some new Rubicon into a realm where the old "politics of personal destruction" has been accelerated by tossing the ballast of simple logic overboard. It's okay, now, to propose bills that stand for the opposite of what you believe in, just as long as you think they might help you win back a few points in the polls.
"We proposed the bill only because we wanted to vote it down!" may seem like a smart bit of parliamentary jujitsu. It has everything going for it but honesty. Whether or not it wins the Republicans the points they're after, it's an affront to the military dead -- and to the living soldiers who are still stuck in the field. They, along with Murtha, still understand that this is a mortally serious business, even if the Congressional majority doesn't.
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