Cheap Political Stunt

Republicans in both houses of Congress have begun--tentatively to be sure--to call out Nancy Pelosi's leadership:

Republican leaders in both houses of Congress Monday urged Speaker Nancy Pelosi to call the House back immediately to finalize emergency legislation to fund the war on terrorism." A Pelosi spokesman called the letter "a cheap political stunt."

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio joined other Republicans in signing a letter to Pelosi. The Iraq supplemental spending bill "has been pending since February 5, but your leadership team chose to leave town for more than two weeks rather than completing this bill," it said.

While noting that the Senate "appointed conferees on March 29, moments after passing its version of the bill," the GOP lawmakers said they were "especially troubled" by the fact that the House never named its own conferees despite passing its bill a week earlier.

In other words, Nancy doesn't seem in too much of a hurry. Her team didn't take kindly to the Republican characterization:

Back in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly was not impressed with the letter.

"Coming from the Republicans, who ran the 'do-nothing' Congress, this letter is a cheap political stunt," Daly said in an e-mail message to Cybercast News Service.

Ouch. At first blush that sounds like it'll leave a mark. However, upon further review it's not so clearly a winning message.

Whatever do I mean, you wonder? Well, since we're on the subject of cheap political stunts...

The Essence of the 16 Words

God love Tom Maguire:

The fact that Saddam did not succeed in purchasing uranium from Niger is a separate issue from the question of whether his agents made the attempt. That seemingly simple bit of logic has stumped Joe Wilson and his admirers for years, and evidently baffles the WaPo today.

Indeed.

Why Senators suck

Via Instapundit:

IN IT FOR THE LONG HAUL . . . er, until the long haul actually, you know, happens. Here's what Chuck Hagel and Joe Biden said in 2002:

Although no one doubts our forces will prevail over Saddam Hussein's, key regional leaders confirm what the Foreign Relations Committee emphasized in its Iraq hearings last summer: The most challenging phase will likely be the day after -- or, more accurately, the decade after -- Saddam Hussein.

Once he is gone, expectations are high that coalition forces will remain in large numbers to stabilize Iraq and support a civilian administration. That presence will be necessary for several years, given the vacuum there, which a divided Iraqi opposition will have trouble filling and which some new Iraqi military strongman must not fill.

So, it was a project for a decade then. But now it's cut-and-run. (Via The Corner).

When the going gets tough, the tough get running...er...um...

Bribery still pays

This time 'round in the Senate. Glenn has his customary round-up with snarky commentary (No, I don't think Glenn is a snark but he can be and is often...usually at exactly the right time an at the righ pitch):

THEY'RE RUNNING AWAY WITH THEIR LITTLE CURLY TAILS BETWEEN THEIR LEGS: The Senate has just passed an Iraq withdrawal bill, which like the House bill was laden with pork to buy votes.

It's a disgrace, but par for the course for this bunch.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, read this from Jules Crittenden.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ed Driscoll comments: "Not at all a surprise, of course. But very far removed from how they were actually elected in the first place."

And Don Surber itemizes some of the pork and observes: "Disgusting is too nice a word for people who voted to send troops to Iraq in 2002, and less than 5 years later play political chicken with funding for those very troops."

You don't need a weathervane to know which way the wind's blowing. Just a copy of the Senate voting record.

MORE: Bob Krumm looks at the bright side: "Perhaps President Bush will finally veto a pork-laden spending package."

Heh. If he'd started doing that sooner, he probably wouldn't be facing this problem now.

Surber is right; disgusting doesn't quite cut it but for lack of a better (or more acceptable for family-blogging) adjective, this is disgusting.

And you voted for it America, lets not forget...

New Series: What's in The Nation

This afternoon I decided I needed something to laugh about. It's been a tough, tough week of work and I've devoted far too much of my time to slaving on behalf of the sales morons with whom I have to work (apologies to any sales-types in the audience). So I needed a cool-down. Something that would kick my weekend off in a good way. A variety of thoughts and considerations suddenly lead me to the belly of the beast, Christina Vanden Heuvel's hovel, The Nation.com. While there I perused the offerings to see what might appeal to me in such a battered and brutalized state. There was the expected Bush hatred, Halliburton, class warfare, Plame (still), and Iraq doom and gloom faire. But what caught my eye this afternoon was this preposterous title:

Al Gore, Global Statesman

Ha, ha...ha.....ha....ha....ha, ha, ha....ha....ouch......oh.....ha.....ha,ha, ha...stop....stop....my sides are hurting. Now that was good. Just what the doctor ordered. The piece starts here: Al Gore is not one of those Power Point politicians, which is ironic since Gore has been selling his Inconvenient Perverication routine via PowerPoint for twenty years, but I progress. And it ends here:

Gore has something of the 19th century about him. He is almost courtly in his manners. He can talk to Republicans, at least of the non-flat-earth variety. He has a deep voice and sometimes he thunders as few modern politicians can. At the same time you would be hard-pressed to find another major public figure so conversant with such a wide span of technology and with the earth, air, fire and water problems which are reaching crisis proportions in our century. It has been so long since we have seen one that we may not remember what one looks like. We may not recognize that Al Gore has become a statesman.

Seriously, stop it! This isn't fair! I'm having a coughing fit.

Anyway, after recovering from this episode, I quickly decided that I need to start doing a series about some of the hilarity that one can find over at David Corn's pone-y home. I think I may do them on Fridays since that seems to be a point in the week when we could all use a little comedy break. So until next time, this is your roving seeker of humor signing off.

Plamegate Puke-o-Rama

We've truly reached the point where things have become totally (as opposed to only slightly) surreal:

So there is going to be a movie about Joe and Valerie Wilson? Don't kill me now - I want to feel the stake in my heart at the moment the film is announced as the winner of "Best Picture".

I assume that the verdicts and appeals in the current trial won't affect this movie, or Hollywood's "understanding" of the Wilson case - after all, if Libby is acquited, that will just prove how clever the cover-up was. And if no one can say whether she was covert as per the IIPA, well, that just proves how deeply covert she was.

Oh, well - I can't wait to see how the screenplay treats all those reporters who misunderstood and misreported on the wisdom of Our Man Joe. Wait, what am I saying? Of course I can wait.

Words fail.