It's pretty common knowledge that politics are a game. It's all about positioning and framing in the interest of furthering your or your party's agenda. But people dying in Iraq are not a game. And the fact that the Republicans pull these partisan games despite OVERWHELMING public opinion against it make them reprehensible to me. I wish Gregg would have to go in front of the surviving families of all those being sacrificed face to face so that he could explain why he is doing this.
It must be handy for the Republican party to have a guy like Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) around. Whenever they start taking the heat over some policy blunder or, as the country is painfully aware, their loyalty to George W. Bush visibly outweighs their love of country on the Iraq war, Gregg's willing to step up to the plate and be Smokescreen Man.
[..]Now, Senate Republicans know the whole country wants an honest debate on the Bush-McCain Doctrine of escalating the Iraq war, so they turn to Smokescreen Man again to try to distract the media by putting forth his own Iraq-escalation resolution. Because Gregg's resolution is about as sincere and meaningful as his love affair with the line-item veto, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is unwilling to waste time on the Senate floor debating it and Republicans have now stomped away from the table, refusing to discuss any aspect of escalating the Iraq war.
So why wouldn't Reid just let Gregg's piece of silliness come to the floor? One reason is that the Continuing Resolution passed by the House last week -- a budget measure necessary to keep the government running after February 15 -- must be debated and passed within days and there's little time to spend on Gregg's charade at the moment.
More importantly, the language in the Gregg proposal is pure nonsense that's meant only to back Democrats into a corner, where they can't win no matter which way they vote.
