Iraq, Impeachment, El Jefe the Monarchist

The Democrats have given in for the moment on Iraq war funding, dropping from the war spending bill provisions ordering troops home from Iraq this fall. Congress enacted this revised bill yesterday: Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Obama voting against it. According to Senator Clinton: "I fully support our troops" but the bill (always a but with those people) "fails to compel the President to give our troops a new strategy in Iraq."

Of course, what the Senator means by a "new strategy" is enough cutting and running to appease the Lefty netroots, but not enough to appear too rabid-Left to be elected President.

What will the Democrats do ? They cannot give their netroots base what it so much wants (defeat in Iraq) -- at least not now: not till they've gulled us, the unwashed and hopelessly un-urban, uneducated, and unsophisticated -- into entrusting them with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So they're holding their collective noses, and voting for war funding: trying to appease the hard left with promises that, as Damascus Nancy says "[t]his debate will go on."

Meanwhile, until the debate goes their way, the Democrats must, must, must find some red meat to throw their supporters -- lest they be castigated as sell-outs. Then campaign contributions would fall, and Democrats would find themselves more under siege than ever from angry Lefties.

They'll have another chance on Iraq in September, but what to do this summer ? It all comes back to Bush -- unpopular and vulnerable. Time for impeachment hearings. No, there's no cause for impeachment -- but that hardly matters. It's politically necessary for the Democrats, so hearings, at least, will happen.

Here's a not unconnected thought for the day, cribbed from C.S. Lewis via (of course), The Monarchist website:

Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison

Watching the solons play political games with war, combined with the approach of a presidential election never fails to make me reflect on the virtues of a monarchy, or at least, to lament what the modern media age has meant to republican government. Relentless pandering to the lowest common denominator; the inability of government to function because of the need to respond to the political handlers; the reduction of everything to spin. Politics is just war by other means.