Senate Democrats Continue to Silence Dissenting Opinions on the Iraq War (and Continue to Assert Their Right to Do So)

1. If you read far enough into John E. Mulligan’s column in today’s Projo on the Iraq war resolutions, you will get beyond the sound bytes and into the actual substance…

After a long buildup, the Iraq debate stalled Monday when the Democrats refused to accept a GOP procedural plan for taking up Republican Warner’s resolution of opposition to Mr. Bush’s plan — which was expected to command a strong bipartisan majority. The Democrats balked because the GOP procedure called for a vote on Republican Gregg’s measure to state opposition to cuts in the spending that supports the troops in the war zone.

If the Democrats feel that a vote on the Warner resolution is so important, and that it will pass, then why can’t they compromise and allow a vote on Senator Gregg’s proposal too?

2. The most surreal moment in the ongoing debate over the various Iraq resolutions comes courtesy of Rhode Island’s newest U.S Senator…

[Senator Sheldon Whitehouse] responded by devoting his first Senate floor speech to the issue, charging as the debate wound down Tuesday night that the Senate had been “silenced by parliamentary maneuver.”

Does it make sense to claim you’ve been “silenced” on a topic, when you’re making a speech on that topic in the legislative chamber of the most powerful country on earth, and that speech gets reported in your home state’s major daily newspaper the very next day? Sadly, Senator Whitehouse's bizarre claim that the Senate has been silenced shows how deeply the Democrats have internalized the idea that their right to criticize the President somewhow also implies that their own positions must never be challenged.

3. Finally, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is wrong when he says, according to an indirect quote from Mr. Mulligan, “that that argument in Congress is about how best to win the war”. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has publicly stated that victory in Iraq is not her objective…

It's not a question of victory. It is a question of how we bring a solution to what is in Iraq. Victory has become a diminished option under the policies of President Bush and the implementation of those policies.