Get It Together

If the Democratic Congressional leadership doesn't get it together soon, they will really have blown their one opportunity to take control of the public discussion on all these major Bush crime issues facing the country, like getting us into the Iraq War and using the war to gut the U.S. Constitution.

But even The New York Times is telling them they should have let the Republicans filibuster on the Webb Amendment to save our soldiers (you know, what they pretend to call "Support Ze Troops"); hell, they should have made them do it:

The current Republican leadership, now in the minority, has organized its entire agenda around the filibuster. In July, the McClatchy newspaper group reported that Republicans were using the threat of filibuster more than at any other time in the nation’s history.

Remember, this is the same batch of Republican senators who denounced Democrats as obstructionist and even un-American and threatened to change the Senate’s rules when Democrats threatened filibusters in 2005 over a few badly chosen judicial nominees. Now Republicans are using it to prevent consideration of an entire war.

Josh Marshall has some similar reactions from smart readers, with this being my favorite:

TPM Reader AC:

Politics is the art of the possible. And when nothing concrete is possible, that leaves theater. I am baffled at Democrats' continual willingness to concede the stage. Veto or no veto, making the GOP filibuster a bill like Webb's is not pointless. It puts vulnerable GOP moderates on the hot seat, it puts the blame for obstruction on the minority where it belongs, and it may force a series of unpopular high-profile vetoes from Bush.

Bag news Notes boils it down to a photograph of Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) after he's been thrashed -- even though his party had a simple majority:

Although I can feel the reflex rolling around in there, I'm decidedly not going to feel Jim's pain. Instead, I'm going to appreciate ... no, relish the fact that Jimmy learned something yesterday -- a hard lesson about what it's like to seek compromise with people who feel nothing.

And Keith Olbermann put the focus back where it belongs -- squarely on the "President", who seems more and more like a poltergeist from a previous century, like maybe the Tenth.