California Conservative

Watching the Republican Senate cave in on itself and join Democrats in passing a resolution on the war is sickening. Dick Cheney seems to be the only one making sense.

The Democrats with their relentless scorch and burn tactics are clearly exercising a planned, coordinated and well executed series of attacks on the President and Republican Party. The Delay indictment, the Plame affair, attacking Rove, trying to rewrite the history of the war, the timing of these events is no accident. These events are timed to have maximum effect next year in the mid-term elections.

What’s amazing is that the Republicans in the Senate are falling for it. Those tactics worked against Schwarzenegger in California where Republicans are a minority, but the Republicans suffer no such disadvantage in the US Congress. Why aren’t they acting like the majority party? Why are they caving?

This cave-in was triggered by the Harriet Meirs nomination. Up till then, conservatives rarely expressed disagreements with the President. Any doubts about President Bush were kept under the surface. That all changed when the conservative base revolted against the Meirs nomination. The ensuing melee seems to have morphed into what we now see. The Senate majority has mistaken the disagreement over the nomination as a signal to abandon the President, and as far as the war is concerned, cut and run.

There have yet to be any concrete proposals advanced by the Democrats. There is rhetoric about the need for a better war plan, though any plans advanced so far have sounded remarkably like what the President is already doing. But the Democrats appear to have the upper hand in public opinion.

It is time to regroup. The recent defense of the war by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld is a good start, but there needs to be more. The President needs to establish a set of realistic and reachable initiatives. He needs to meet at the White House with the Republican Senators and House Members, reestablish his leadership and set national priorities. It’s time for the President to seize the initiative and reset the national debate.

Cross-posted at SactoDan BLOG

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 7:10 am and is filed under Author: SactoDan, DNC, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Liberals, RNC, W, Washington, DC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.