Well, not Rahm Emanuel himself, just someone raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. They were wondering if I’d be willing to pony up $500 to support Congressional candidates in the mid-terms this year. Now, due to circumstances, I’ve been able to give more money than before this in this year’s races, but I haven’t quite hit that level of giving yet.
On top of that, as I told the caller, I’ve decided to target my contributions this cycle to specific candidates. At the national level, I’m being very selective, because I truly think that it’s important that the American people hear from their elected representatives that the Iraq war was a stupid, misguided adventure from the beginning, and that the candidate was either on the record knowing that before the war or has since changed their mind and come to that conclusion. No matter what they think the strategy should be for the future, if they’re unable to come to grips with the reality that the war was a mistake and don’t tell their constituents that, we’re simply doomed to repeat the process again.
I knew that the guy calling was just a volunteer or call center guy, but I still overrode him when he tried to get back on script. He figured out pretty fast that I wasn’t a likely donor, so he said thanks and got off.
Just out of curiosity, I checked the DCCC home page. Would you be surprised that the word Iraq appears nowhere on there?
Looking at their page, you wouldn’t know that there were American troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. It’s all about Republican corruption and high gas prices. The national security debate has been ceded entirely to the Republicans; the DCCC isn’t even saying they’re doing a crappy job there.
You have to drill down through the “Featured Fights” link to get to “Iraq and the Cover-up Congress”. Even there, Iraq is only mentioned as “an ill-planned war” and a result of “poor pre-war planning”. “Alleged manipulation of intelligence” does get a mention, but only as something a Democratic congress “would promptly get to the bottom of”.
This kind of milquetoast scandal-mongering is precisely why Democrats get a bad rap on security issues. There’s no explanation of why these things are bad, just threats to investigate. People need to be told what’s wrong and why it’s wrong, not given a promise that “we’ll look into it”. Nobody chooses to undergo exploratory surgery if they can avoid it, you’d rather have a sure diagnosis. Christ, they even manage to make the plural of HMMWV (aka Humvee) look prissy: “Hum-Vees”. At least GM cancelled the Hummer H1.