This is an off topic comment.....

Legislative sausage making is always somewhat unnerving to watch, but this one actually went quite well by historic standards. The progressives used all of their clout to get as strong a bill as possible and quite a few of the Blue Dogs made the hard choice to vote with the party. The Democratic party is a coalition not a monolith and the fact that they were able to get a bill with virtually everyone on board is a testament to the party's strength not its weakness.

It's very, very difficult for the congress to stop a war. The system is designed to allow the president to run them once the people have signed off and abruptly pulling the plug on funding is a very dicey move. Therefore, defunding is a process --- members of any coalition that leads on such difficult legislation always tend to come together incrementally through various means. We all wish it could happen quickly, but there is simply no precedent for it and no simple means of making that happen...

...This is hideous sausage making, but it's the way our system works. I would suggest that the proposed Lee Amendment (the bill that was discussed ad nauseum, but never actually presented) performed the same function as the "McGovern-Hatfield" Amendment in this negotiation by holding down the left flank and allowing the "moderate" bill to emerge. That's the necessary first step.

If it is such a process, it is unnerving indeed, and difficult to justify.  Zugzwang?

Let's face it, the public is smart enough and impatient enough to know when the election comes slamming down the pike and nothing has changed in Iraq (unless some smart thugs realize that taking the reins and loudly introducing legislation to end the war closer to the election might help them pull off the comeback party of the decade while the Dems are forced to go along)the voters are going to blame the party "in charge". Those short attention spans might pin it on Bush but the press will help push the meme - "Hey, why didn't the Democrats end the war?" "What were they waiting for?"

The thugs have learned that you start by asking for the ridiculous pie-in-the-sky dream and accepting what you truly were after in the first place. You move the window and the unacceptable suddenly becomes acceptable because you started off by asking for something ludicrous:

Give me a $100.
WTF?
Okay, give me $50.
In your dreams.
Okay, loan me $20.
I can do that.

Democrats have yet to learn that technique. They also don't seem to understand that bunnies compromising with coyotes always end up as bunny tartare.

By caving so soon they've won nothing except the ability to say they've passed something. All they have to celebrate is a fleeting PR win. Woo Hoo! High fives!

The basic problem is they hold a weak hand (sadly it's the hand they've dealt themselves after stacking the deck with Blue Dog jokers) and it's highly possible the thugs will call their bluff.

I sincerely hope Bush does throw his little pissy party or the legislation stalls in the Senate. IOW, I hope this PR victory for the Democrats sustains itself for a while longer and they are forced to start again. Then they can set up another PR victory and paint the thugs and Bush as obstructionists to the will of the majority of Americans.

I mean, how freaking hard is it to tell America you are supporting the troops by passing legislation that funds pulling them out? That our job is done there and the Iraqis need to run their own country?  

Or can they corner the thugs? By keeping the compromises so high and the expectations so low, can they construct stronger legislation and continuing pushing the administration and the thugs into more concrete action when the system is set up to obstruct any movement on Iraq? Do they have the courage or the political will?

In regards to the current legislation my fear is the Senate will compromise further, the House will still want to maintain their "victory", and in the end Bush gets his money with virtually no strings attached. Everyone pats each other on the back while more bodies get stuck in the grinder.

As much as I'd love to see Pelosi stating an unequivocal, "No, absolutely not." when the bill comes back ripped apart by the Senate, it just doesn't seem likely. Hang on to that "win" and hope the voters don't notice. In the end Bush gets what he wanted in the first place and the Dems will share the war that they helped keep alive because they "didn't have the votes".

They may not have the votes but they do have the public and instead of compromising their goal should be painting the thugs as sole owners of this war and the only ones determined to sacrifice our soldiers and piss away our tax dollars for nothing more than Halliburton's bottom line, the oil company's security and profits, and Bush's legacy.

I don't know if the supplemental is a major step forward or not.  I know it won't end the war, since this was has been coming for sixty years and is part and parcel of a militaristic political structure that we must and are working to disassemble within both parties.  But it is a major step forward in terms of our movement, as we affirmatively passed a significant piece of legislation through a House which, while full of some new blood, saw its Democratic membership grow by only 20% in 2006.  Moveon was true to its members in helping this happen

I found plenty wrong with the Iraq Supplemental, without MoveOn's aid, without MyDD's insight, without "prejudice aforehand" from Pelosi and the beltway Dems.

And no, the inclusion of the "spinach fund" did not help one little bit.

I found it by reading the bloody thing... and bloody it is.

Iraq Supplemental: Continue to Fund a Hopeless Situation Until A Date Uncertain

Is it too much too late to ask that when people discuss this bill that they refer to its particulars???

Language Removed From the Iraq Supplemental that Pelosi PROMISED She Would Take Up At A Later Time:

The (Iraq Supplemental) funds can be used for attacking Iran, since the final version removed language saying the president had to get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran.

"MoveOn did not point out that that the Pelosi's Supplemental Appropriation's bill:

•  Will keep the war going well into 2008;
  
•  It omits Rep.. Barbara Lee's amendment, which would have fully funded withdrawal by the end of the 2007;
  
•  It gives the President the right to waive requirements that troops sent to Iraq must be properly trained, equipped and rested;
  
•  The funds can be used for attacking Iran, since the final version removed language saying the president had to get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran.
  
•  And finally, MoveOn neglects to tell its members how absurd it is to give George Bush another $100 billion for war when there is no military solution to the violence in Iraq."

Under the many conflicts between George W. Bush and most of his opponents in the Democratic and Republican parties lies an area of agreement seldom challenged in the mainstream political or media world (or, when challenged, given remarkably little attention). On the deepest points, major politicians and the most influential parts of the media are actually in remarkable accord. In fact, you could say that, in the world of our media gatekeepers, there's just another version of the sort of accord that existed before the invasion of Iraq.

Although the focus of his article is on why more Americans are not out protesting, I found this paragraph right on point.  The sad truth is that most of the political establishment, Dems included, are not in fact against the war.  That the House just passed this resolution bears witness.

He continues, pointing to Hillary Clinton as an example and talks about an aspect of the resolution I haven't heard touched on here or other online communities - chances are because the actual text of the resolution was seldom if ever quoted (I can't help but wonder if the House actually kept it from us while they added the pork):

That country, it is said, is crucial to "American interests" -- "vital national security interests in Iraq" was the way, for instance, Hillary Clinton put the matter recently. There is also agreement (as there was about such things in the Vietnam era) that if we were to leave Iraq totally or "precipitously," American credibility would take a terrible hit, that the terrorists would be "celebrating." It is similarly agreed that, while all sorts of partial withdrawals from Iraq might sooner or later be possible, actually withdrawing from the country is hard to imagine, even if staying seems hardly less so. This is why, as in the recently passed House legislation, withdrawal of all American forces has been replaced by the withdrawal of all, or most, American "combat troops" (or "combat brigades"), a technical term that actually accounts for less than half of American forces in Iraq.

The two categories are now so conveniently blurred that it would be pardonable if few Americans grasped the difference any more than did Charles Gibson, anchor of ABC's World News Tonight. On last Friday's news, he claimed the House had voted to get "all U.S. forces" out when his own White House correspondent used the correct phrase, "combat forces."

I think it goes to show that Washington does what it wants and has come to expect us to go along with it.  As a point of comparison Tom's piece talks about antiwar mobilisation during the Vietnam War and how protest in America seems to be "demobilized".  While he examines the role the draft played in 60s/70s, in the end he points to what I clearly felt last week after my phone calls, emails, etc.:

Today, it crosses no young minds that the top officials in the White House might be listening. Many fewer young people, I suspect, have any remnant of that deep faith that our political system could be responsive to them or that anything they could do might change it. When they look to Washington, what they see is fraud, dysfunction, conspiracy, cronyism, cabal, influence-peddling, corruption, fear -- in short, a system, a world, beyond response, possibly beyond repair, and utterly alien to their lives. In such a situation, despair or apathy tends to replace anger and hope.

The Iraq demobilization, then, is certainly part of a larger demobilization, a deeper belief that, as Bill Moyers made vividly clear in a recent speech, your vote doesn't matter; that democracy is a-functional; that none of this has anything to do with you, or your ballot, or your feet, or your sign, or your shout.