Spanking Murtha

Sundays in our house means a couple of things. First and foremost of course, we will be in church. Secondly, most weeks any way, it means that Brit Hume will at some point in that week's Fox News Sunday broadcast, be spanking Juan Williams for saying something silly. Well, this week Juan gets a respite.

No, the recipient of today's spanking is Democratic Congressman John Murtha. During the panel discussion, Chris Wallace played a short blurb of Murtha's comments to MoveCongress.org last week. In a clip that doesn't look much better than it reads, Murtha quotes some suspect numbers and continues his now-routine over-generalizations of Iraq. Of it, Brit had this to say:

That sound bite from John Murtha suggests that it’s time a few things be said about him. Even the “Washington Post” noted he didn’t seem particularly well informed about what’s going on over there, to say the least. Look, this man has tremendous cachet among House Democrats, but he is not — this guy is long past the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.

And that sound bite is naivete at large, and the man is an absolute fountain of such talk, and the fact that he has ascended to the position he has in the eyes of the Democrats in the House and perhaps Democrats around the country tells you a lot about how much they know or care about what’s really going on over there.

What is it that Jack has wrong? From the Post: Mr. Murtha's cynicism is matched by an alarming ignorance about conditions in Iraq. He continues to insist that Iraq "would be more stable with us out of there," in spite of the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies that early withdrawal would produce "massive civilian casualties." He says he wants to force the administration to "bulldoze" the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year. He wants to "get our troops out of the Green Zone" because "they are living in Saddam Hussein's palace"; could he be unaware that the zone's primary occupants are the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy?

Murtha is the point-man on the House effort to derail the war. Too bad he doesn't have much of a clue as to what the surge truly is or why and how it might actually work.

From the "Do I look that Stupid" department...

Also from today's FNS broadcast, we give you Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. Levin continues pressing the point that in whatever world it is that Congressional Dems now inhabit, up is down, down is up and criticism is support:

WALLACE: Senator, there are several ideas out there about how to change course — either cut off funding — Congressman Murtha, as you know, has come up with the idea of setting benchmarks for how troops that could be sent over that he knows the Pentagon can't meet.
Senator Biden is talking about repealing the 2002 authorization to go to war. What approach do you favor?

LEVIN: Well, hopefully, we can come up with a bipartisan approach. We got seven Republicans who voted with us yesterday. We hope to pick up at least that many and maybe a few more.
I think probably the best approach would be to modify the authorization to the president to go to war in Iraq. That was a wide-open authorization which allowed him to do just about anything and put us now deep into combat in Iraq, and now into the neighborhoods of Baghdad.
We, I think, will be looking at a modification of that authorization in order to limit the mission of American troops to a support mission instead of a combat mission, and that is very different from cutting off funds.

I don't think there's support to cut off funds. I think that sends the wrong message to our troops. We're going to support our troops. And one way to support them is to find a way out of Iraq earlier rather than later.

Host Chris Wallace voiced my own confusion at precisely what it was the Senator was saying in his follow up:

WALLACE: So you're saying that the idea would be to restate what the authorization Congress gave the president is and to say that it doesn't include combat? I'm not quite sure what you're saying this modified authorization would do.

It's all clear now. What he said was, "We're going to support our troops. And one way to support them is to find a way out of Iraq earlier rather than later." What he might as well have said was, "We support the troops. So much so, we're going to keep them from doing their job."