But Joe Biden will, with his statement "I will vote, as long as there's a single troop in there that we are taking out or maintaining, either way I will vote for the money necessary to protect them", actively and knowingly perpetuate a lie. The lie that not funding the occupation equals not funding the troops.

Why, Joe? Are you dumb enough to believe that voters are as stupid as you treat them? Are you dumb enough to believe that insulting their intelligence will win you support?

Emergency supplemental funding for a war or for an occupation is not for the troops. It never has been for the troops. It will never be for the troops.

NOT passing emergency supplemental funding does not hurt the troops. It never has hurt the troops. It will never hurt the troops.

Not passing emergency supplemental funding is simply NOT FUNDING the occupation. That is all it is.
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The TROOPS are funded by regular appropriations. DOD budget. Emergency supplemental funding has nothing to do with "funding the troops".
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Defunding the occupation of Iraq and withdrawing or redeploying the troops does not hurt the troops. It helps them to stay alive.

Congress quietly passes billions for Iraq.

Yesterday, the Senate voted 94-1 for "a stop-gap spending bill that gives the Bush White House at least $9 billion in new funding" for the Iraq war. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) was the sole dissenter in the Senate; the House voted 404-14 to approve the measure. Congress also granted the administration "emergency authority to tap further into a $70 billion `bridge fund'" for the occupation while "Congress works on appropriations bills."

Here is the problem, FOR ALL OF THEM, in a nutshell:

In response to Gravel's suggestion that the Democratic Senators do the following:

"Well, the first thing, you stop the debate by voting every single day on cloture. Every day. Twenty days, and you'll overcome cloture.

The president vetoes the law. It comes back to the Congress. And in the House at noon every single day you vote to override the president's veto. And in 40 days, the American people will have weighed in, put the pressure on those.

You tell me that the votes aren't there -- you go get them by the scruff of the neck, that's what you do. You make them vote."

Mr. Dodd said:

"I think it's a little unrealistic to assume every single day you do that, Mike. But certainly you can do this when the opportunity arises."

...if leading Democrats heard enough people say to them that they will not vote for ANY Democrats next year EXCEPT Democrats who have been vocally, and by their votes on supplementals, calling for total withdrawal from Iraq they would quickly notice.

They are politicians after all, and they are concerned with winning elections.

They would notice if enough people turned the tables on them and used fear to motivate them, instead of voting simply out of fear of republicans.

If Democrats were filled with fear that they would lose Congress and the presidency UNLESS the occupation was ended before the 2008 elections, they would end the occupation of Iraq.

The Democratic Party's pretense of opposing the war in Iraq has largely collapsed following a series of defeats in the US Senate last week of Democratic-sponsored legislation proposing timetables for partial "redeployment" of the more than 160,000 troops currently occupying the country.

Nothing could make clearer the real position of the party, however, than the Democratic debate Wednesday night in New Hampshire, in which all three of the party's leading presidential candidates--Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards--refused to commit themselves, if elected, to withdrawing all American troops from Iraq by the beginning of their second term--in 2013.

I think maybe it is time to back Chris Dodd instead of John Edwards.