November 21, 2005

Here’s to John Murtha.

At last, a voice of sanity and courage and outrage and compassion, daring to defy the White House and the timorous game plan of bigwig Democrats.

Wasn’t it great to see a politician speak from the gut and the heart and the brain instead of from the calculator they all carry in their back pockets?

Wasn’t it great to see the Republicans shooting themselves in the foot as they fired off that defective ammunition of traitor, of coward, once too often?

And here’s to Martin Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, for telling the Republicans off: “You guys are pathetic, pathetic,” he said, and that was absolutely the right word for them.

But let’s be clear: The Iraq war was unpopular even before Murtha took his stance. And it would have kept trending downward, but it will do so more quickly now, since he has put his hawkish face of respectability squarely on the anti-war side. That doesn’t mean U.S. troops will come home within a year’s time, though.

Bush has trapped himself with his own rhetoric of “total victory” and “finishing the job.” And then, of course, there’s Cheney and Rumsfeld who still want that oil and those military bases.

The question is, how long can Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld defy a majority of the American public and an increasingly restive Congress?

If we keep the heat on Congress, those troops may get out of there yet.

One final thing: While Murtha is not the bastard child of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan, as some of Bush’s attack dogs snarled, it is gratifying that Murtha is making some of the very arguments that the peace movement has been advancing all along.

So there’s plenty of credit to go around.