Stop Me Before I Vote Again

http://media.brookings.edu/MediaArchive/comm/events/20070126Hoyer.wmv

(Don't watch the video unless you're a glutton for punishment; Hoyer is so deathly dull he makes Joe Biden look like William Jennings Bryan. This image, strange and unsettling as it is, barely begins to convey the man's creepy, leaden, golem-like demeanor. He acts like he's under remote control from a distant location -- Jerusalem, perhaps? -- over a very low-bandwidth satellite link.)

His interminable speech boiled down to this: it was a good idea to go into Iraq, but the Administration fucked it up. First, they gave the wrong reason -- preemption based on WMDs that "turned out" not to exist (as if Steny and all his congressional colleagues weren't perfectly well aware, all along, that they didn't exist). Steny thought our pretext should have been a different one: namely, the fact that the late Saddam Hussein failed to comply with various UN resolutions. One wonders whether it has occurred to Steny that this same pretext would also serve quite nicely for an invasion of Israel.

Not only did the Admiistration fuck up the pretext, according to Steny, they also fucked up the execution. And what was the problem? Our old friend "boots on the ground," extravagantly vulgarized by Steny. He took the number of troops used in Mr Clinton's dear little Serbian war -- which he considers, of course, our finest hour in recent memory -- divided that by the population of Kosovo (not Serbia, oddly), then multiplied by the population of Iraq, and came up with half a million troops. Fifty divisions! That's the ticket! (The United States Army currently has ten active divisions.)

So. Next time one of your Democratic-party friends starts telling what the Democrats would or would not have done, you can tell them what their House majority leader at least says he would have done. I bet your friend will cling to his illusions rather than believe what his own honchos are saying.