On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 07:39:42 GMT, "torresD" <torresd30@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Bush has trapped himself with his own
rhetoric of "total victory" and
"finishing the job."

And then, of course, there's Cheney
and Rumsfeld who still want that oil
and those military bases.

http://progressive.org/mag_wx112105
Thank You, John Murtha
By Matthew Rothschild
November 21, 2005

Here's to John Murtha.

At last,
a voice of sanity and courage
and outrage and compassion,
daring to defy the White House
and the timorous game plan of
bigwig Democrats.

Wasn't it great to see a politician
speak from the gut and the heart and
the brain instead of from the calculator
they all carry in their back pockets?

Wasn't it great to see the Republicans
shooting themselves in the foot as they
fired off that defective ammunition of
traitor, of coward, once too often?

And here's to Martin Meehan,
Democrat of Massachusetts,
for telling the Republicans off:

"You guys are pathetic, pathetic,"
he said,

and that was absolutely
the right word for them.

But let's be clear:

The Iraq war was unpopular even
before Murtha took his stance.

And it would have kept trending downward,
but it will do so more quickly now,
since he has put his hawkish face
of respectability squarely on the
anti-war side.

That doesn't mean U.S. troops will
come home within a year's time, though.

Bush has trapped himself with his own
rhetoric of "total victory" and
"finishing the job."

And then, of course, there's Cheney
and Rumsfeld who still want that oil
and those military bases.

The question is, how long can Bush,
and Cheney, and Rumsfeld defy a majority of
the American public and an increasingly
restive Congress?

If we keep the heat on Congress,
those troops may get out of there yet.

One final thing:

While Murtha is not the *****
child of Michael Moore and Cindy
Sheehan, as some of Bush's attack
dogs snarled,

it is gratifying that Murtha is
making some of the very arguments
that the peace movement has been
advancing all along.

So there's plenty of credit to go around.