George Bush reported yesterday that we are doing well in Iraq, but insisted that it was premature to talk about bringing troops home. What kind of a fantasy land does he live in? Then a friend sent me the following quotes that point out just how hypocritical our leaders are -- even when it comes to matters of life and death. At least we can hope that history will remind us of the truth and that it will eventually win out.

These are quotes offered up by Republican leaders back when President Clinton was committing U.S. troops to Bosnia. Reading them, you can almost feel like you've fallen through the looking glass...

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." -- Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

"You can support the troops but not the president." -- Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years." -- Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?" -- Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home." -- Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area." -- Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today" -- Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/lyn-lear/war-and-peace-falling-th_5568.html

On Viet Nam, Joe supports the Administration.

"Joe was no student radical, that's for sure," Terry Segal, a Boston lawyer who was also a classmate, said. "He was what was known then as a 'regular.' He was cautious. There were people who wanted the Yale Democrats to take positions on things like Vietnam, but Joe supported the Administration."

Bill Clinton help's Joe.

In 1970, after a short stint at a private law firm, Lieberman decided to put Bailey's lessons to work, and ran for a seat in the state senate, knocking on thousands of doors with a corps of campaign volunteers that included Bill Clinton, then a Yale law student.

Ol' Joe attacks from the left and THE RIGHT.

Lieberman remained behind in the polls until his political consultant, Carter Eskew, designed a series of television advertisements that portrayed Weicker as a cartoon bear, drowsing when he should be working. "We ran at him from the left and the right,"

Joe is not anti-business, joins the DLC.

In the Senate, Lieberman began to display a distinctive ideological pedigree. More important than any partisan affiliation, he had a reverence for American institutions--among them family, faith, private enterprise, and government itself. It was thus not surprising that Lieberman fell in with a group of moderate Democrats who were trying to remake the Party through the Democratic Leadership Council, which served as a sort of idea factory to revitalize the Party. "At that time, we were looking at why our party kept losing the Presidency," Al From, the longtime head of the D.L.C., told me. "It was because we were losing the heart of the electorate, the people who go to work every day and play by the rules. It was around that time that we came up with our slogan: 'Opportunity, Responsibility, Community.' "

"The New Democrat movement was originally started in the mid-eighties by people who were particularly concerned with two themes," Lieberman told me. "And these themes worked their way through the Clinton years--to regain the confidence of the American people as a party that not only understood and cared about national security but was prepared to protect national security, and to rebuild confidence in the Democratic Party as a party that not only cared about economic growth but knew how to help create economic growth and understood that to do that you couldn't be anti-business."

10. The Wicked Witch of the East actually HAD weapons of mass destruction.

9. Local contracts were awarded to the Lullaby League and the Lollipop Guild, not Halliburton.

8. Dorothy apologized for her misuse of the House's powers.

7. Evil oppressor legally verified as "really most sincerely dead" rather than "maybe dead."

6. Dorothy got it that she wasn't in Kansas any more.

5. Dorothy didn't take Toto with her just because he was Prime Minister.

4. Dorothy didn't jail Munchkins and make them blow each other for the cameras.

3. Dorothy had no interest in stealing the Munchkin's oil.

2. Dorothy wasn't taking orders from either the one with no brain or the one with no heart.

1. Dorothy didn't kill 100,000 civilian Munchkins, smirk, and then go on about her deep respect for life.

After last November's defeat, Democrats were like aviation investigators sifting through twisted metal in a cornfield, struggling to posit theories about the disaster all around them. Some put the onus on John Kerry, saying he had never found an easily discernable message. Others, including Kerry himself, wrote off the defeat to the unshakable realities of wartime, when voters were supposedly less inclined to jettison a sitting president. Liberal activists blamed mushy centrists. Mushy centrists blamed Michael Moore. As the weeks passed, however, at Washington dinner parties and in public post-mortems, one explanation took hold not just among Washington insiders but among far-flung contributors, activists and bloggers too: the problem wasn't the substance of the party's agenda or its messenger as much as it was the Democrats' inability to communicate coherently. They had allowed Republicans to control the language of the debate, and that had been their undoing.

Even in their weakened state, Democrats resolved not to let it happen again. And improbably, given their post-election gloom, they managed twice in the months that followed to make good on that pledge. The first instance was the skirmish over the plan that the president called Social Security reform and that everybody else, by spring, was calling a legislative disaster. The second test for Democrats was their defense of the filibuster (the time-honored stalling tactic that prevents the majority in the Senate from ending debate), which seemed at the start a hopeless cause but ended in an unlikely stalemate. These victories weren't easy to account for, coming as they did at a time when Republicans seem to own just about everything in Washington but the first-place Nationals. (And they're working on that.) During the first four years of the Bush administration, after all, Democrats had railed just as loudly against giveaways to the wealthy and energy lobbyists, and all they had gotten for their trouble were more tax cuts and more drilling. Something had changed in Washington -- but what?

Democrats thought they knew the answer. Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was ''framing.'' Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.

more at...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/17DEMOCRATS.html