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Senate Folds on War
Cowards
Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks, February 6, 2007
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Three cowards: |
You knew something like this could, indeed would, happen. You just didn’t expect it to happen so pitifully. Senate Republicans easily managed to block debate on a plan to oppose the Bush junta’s Iraq surge. The measure needed 60 votes to enable debate. Democrats didn’t even manage to get their own ranks in order. They tallied up 49 votes, with 47 voting against. (See the vote here.) Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, voted against it (the only Democrat to do so), although that’s a procedural matter. Every Republican voted against it except John McCain and Florida’s own Bush clone, Mel Martinez. One Republican joined the Democrats: Susan Collins of Maine. “This afternoon’s result,” Carl Hulse wrote for the Times, “cast doubt on whether the Senate would move toward a vote on what lawmakers of both parties described as the paramount issue of the day. Now it appears certain that more negotiations will take place on what war-related measure, if any, will be voted upon.” What a pathetic show of non-binding force. What a cowardly act. What an expected surrender. On the most important issue of the day. They won’t even debate it. Won’t look at it in the face. That’s what the Iraq war has come to, back-alley grab for cannon fodder, all in the name of an elusive thing called “American prestige,” lost so long ago that Senators don’t even know it. Makes you think the entire thing was staged. Give the Democrats a chance to look tough and live up to their campaign pledges all the while knowing that the Republican minority would do them this little favor and stand in the way. In any case the escalation is well on its way in Iraq. The troops are on the ground, some of them already six feet beneath it. The Bush junta will take this as a victory, the way Osama once touted a minor skirmish in the “jihad” against the Soviets as a victory, and rode it all the way to his mythmaker’s bank; Osama never was the fighter or the victorious insurgent he’s portrayed himself to be, in the war against the Soviets in 1980s Afghanistan. He was ridiculed by Afghans and, often enough, by his own ragtag army of Arab mujahideens. The similarities with Bush keep growing, scraggly beard-like. Osama must be smiling again in his tent. Or cave. Or on the French Riviera where, for all we know, he’s been shacking up with six whores, three bankers and an accountant since 2003, when he figured out that Bush could be left to shooting himself in the foot many times over. But the fact remains: this is the best the Democrats could muster, after all this time, and on a day when the Bush junta revealed its military budget to bust all budgets.
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| THE DAILY JOURNAL |
VANPOEM |
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As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat
Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.
On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.
It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into
before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.
Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown. |
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—Van Foreman |
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