With logic like this, who needs drooling blather?
David Broder says Harry Reid’s inept but offers no evidence that his judgment’s ever been wrong. One conclusion:
Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.
To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.
Had Broder been paying attention, he’d recognize that Bush lacks any capacity to negotiate on the war. He’s rejected every alternative except continuing no matter which side of the partisan divide has told him to end the war.
There is nothing ‘essential’ in pursuing the futile exercise of negotiating with a single-minded fool. The only course left for Reid is to keep talking the truth, while Bush’s legislative sycophants keep digging their brown noses deep into his posterior.
Because the bigger war is the war to restore sanity to our government. And Reid is displaying leadership in that effort. It was only last year I doubted that Reid could set aside his centrist values to provide that degree of leadership. And now that he’s doing so, Broder claims he’s confusing everyone. While making it clear that the real solutions must wait ‘until a new president takes office.’
Broder rightly offers evidence of the ineptitude of Gonzalez and Bush. Unwittingly, by quoting Reid, he makes Reid look pretty astute.
I’ve given up trying to determine why Broder’s still a syndicated columnist. I can only assume that managing editors of many newspapers are regularly bribed by Broder to overlook the fact that he’s lost his battle against dementia.
People think of Broder as the ‘Dean’ of the Washington press corps because of things he did in the 60s and 70s. But the man he is today is much more a product of the long conservative ascendancy of the last three decades — an ascendancy still very much alive in the town’s journalistic and editorial elite. You can hear the animus more and more sharply in this columns as his inability to grasp the political moment becomes more and more clear.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:30 am
Broder’s just a flat, thin surface that shakes whenever the Wurlitzer is revved up.
OT, Kevin, but did you send me an email this week? Because I thought you did and I accidentally deleted it. Could you resend?