Quit Pretending

What an edifying spectacle it is, seeing our wise and courageous national legislators quizzing Possible Future Caesar and Current General David Petraeus on the surge withdrawal pause or whatever this week's name for the Way Forward is.

I have no wish to criticize any congressional Republicans here, nor any of the official Democratic warhawks. These people have publicly signed up as agreeing with the Bush administration's war crimes, and are, in St. Paul's words, "dead in their sins." To complain about them is like going to a cemetery, digging up a few hundred graves, and then complaining that the occupants won't move, won't talk, and are rotting and stinking; it is idle. Everyone knows that corpses are like that. Instead, I'm here to talk about the Vichy Democrats: the Pelosis and Reids and Clintons and Obamas and Boxers and Feinsteins of this world. These folks are very happy to tell us that George the Younger is pathetically deficient as a Wartime Decider; doing no more than that, they are widely credited among the Serious Washington Players by the Responsible Press as being "antiwar".

Well, now.

Most of them voted to authorize the Decider to do whatever he felt like doing, after the Holy Nine-Eleven. (I would say "all of them" except for the presence of the Barackster, who was not yet on duty at the time, and who now says he wouldn't have voted to authorize; the presumption of innocence probably obliges us to proceed on the assumption that his claim is true.) All of them reflexively claim to "support the troops" -- whatever that might mean. All of them have repeatedly voted to fund the Excellent Iraq Adventure with whatever money the Decider claims it requires -- every ruinously-borrowed dime of it. Not one of them has introduced articles of impeachment against Dick "Cthulhu" Cheney or his simian meat-puppet.

But when Bush's current chief military surge implementer appears on Capitol Hill, how the Vichy Democrats do enjoy chewing his ears! It feels a little silly to complain about a small thing like dishonesty, compared with the moral train wreck of having enabled the murders of hundreds of thousands of foreigners, of whom hundreds of thousands didn't perpetrate the Holy Nine-Eleven, and also a relatively trifling number (4,000 or so) of Americans. But dishonesty it is: when you're willing to applaud the great war criminal figurehead himself each January, when he visits your House to mouth a State of the Union address -- then belabor his minions for doing what their boss told them to do, and for doing what you paid them to do. And are still paying them to do. And (in several cases, at least) what you plan to continue paying them to do into the indefinite future.

Vichy Democrats: you're just as dead as your colleagues. Quit prancing around and pretending. Get underground. The stink's getting to be a bit much.