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Originally Posted by roachboy
i think people are dreaming too much. i would much much prefer to see something coherent being done in/about iraq--but it aint happening. that the democrats do not have the numbers of come into town all cowboy in the white hat and change everything all at once is obvious--but they are NOT the party responsible for the chaos in iraq and i absolutely do not understand how it is that people hold them responsible for the chaos in a sense because they lack the numbers to do anything.
the problem lay in the political order itself. that iraq happened at all is in itself an index of a serious, deep problem with how this government operates and how the political system of which it is an expression functions. it amounts to a wholesale breakdown in even the most rudimentary oversight of a self-evidently incompetent administration.
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I think that perception of the Deeper Problem affects how people see Democrats. There's frustration with them for being passive/complicit in the runup to the Iraq debacle. It is at least partly in that sense that they are being held responsible. That frustration goes back to at least '02, and has fueled, among other things, the campaign against that formerly Democratic Senator from Conn. and the opposition to HRC's presidential campaign. Perhaps they didn't have the votes to defeat the Iraq war measures, but did they have to vote FOR them? The "bum intelligence" excuse doesn't cut it. Anyone with half a brain knew it was bogus. Many Democrats were trying to align themselves with what they imagined to be a national consensus.
This desire to be aligned with an imagined national mood made oversight impossible. At least half of the official opposition was too timid to oppose, even symbolically. Of course, this desire to be One with the Nation wasn't peculiar to Democratic pols. On the whole, US journalists were reluctant to debunk the shabby case for the war. Even "just folks" were afraid to criticise the course of events without previous signals from their conversation partners that dissent was OK.