H RES 571 RECORDED VOTE 18-Nov-2005 11:33 PM
QUESTION: On Agreeing to the Resolution
BILL TITLE: Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately

—- AYES 3 —

Cynthia McKinney- representing the 4th District of Georgia, comprising most of DeKalb and the Southwest portion of Gwinett Counties.

Jose Serrano – representing the 16th District of New York, comprising most of the South Bronx.

Robert Wexler -representing the 19th District of Florida, comprising portions of Palm Beach and Broward Counties.

—- ANSWERED “PRESENT” 6 —

Mike Capuano – representing the 8th District of Massachusetts, comprising the towns of Cambridge, Chelsea, Somerville, and 70% of Boston.

William Lacy Clay Jr. – representing the 1st District of Missouri, comprising portions of St. Louis.

Maurice Hinchey – representing the 22nd District of New York: Binghamton, Newburgh, and the Catskills – Broome, comprising all or portions of Duchess, Orange, Sullivan, Tioga, Tompkins, and Ulster Counties.

Jim McDermott – representing the 7th District of Washington -comprising King County and including Seattle, Vashon Island, and parts of Shoreline, Tukwila, SeaTac, and Burien.

Jerrold Nadler – representing the 8th District of New York, comprising a spectacular gerrymander: most of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and most parts of Clinton, Chelsea, SoHo, Greenwich Village, TriBeCa, and Downtown Manhattan; and in Brooklyn: parts of Boro Park, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Gravesend, Dyker Heights, Bath Beach, and Seagate.

Major R. Owens – representing the 11th District of New York, comprising all or portions of the East Flatbush, Park Slope, Crown Heights, and Brownsville neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

—————————

Hinchey, at least, represents a largely non-rich liberal, non-inner city minority district. He ought to be vulnerable. Woodstock shouldn’t be able to out-vote the rest of New York’s 22nd District.

Kurt Vonnegut, a great American writer who served honorably in WWII, is now 83. The vissicitudes of age combined with long exposure to the ideational pathologies endemic in the community of fashion have afflicted Vonnegut cruelly. He is obviously mad as Lear, and has made an international spectacle of himself in an interview with the Weekend Australian, praising suicide bombers, defending their cause, and abusing the administration.

He removeth away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the understanding of the aged.

–Job 12:20.

Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette has compiled an Iraq War Timeline, 1990-2003, which is going to prove a handy reference. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Unfortunately, Greyhawk omits referencing the highly significant fact that “during Operation Desert Storm the Iraqi Air Force did not seek to challenge Coalition air forces, and nearly half the Iraqi Air Force fled to Iran, to escape destruction” an obvious key precedent for WMDs not captured in the course of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. See the Bill Tierney interview linked below.

In an unusual floor action, Representative Jean Schmidt (R-2nd District Ohio) today was forced to withdraw remarks she made referring to Congressman John Murtha as a “coward.” After making the remarks, amid vocal protests from her colleagues, Rep. Schmidt took back her statement to avoid breaking House rules regarding impuning the integrity of another Member of Congress.
——————————————————————————–
The Speaker Pro Tempore: The gentlelady from Ohio is recognized for one minute.

Ms. Schmidt: Yesterday I stood at Arlington National Cemetery attending the funeral of a young marine in my district. He believed in what we were doing is the right thing and had the courage to lay his life on the line to do it. A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bop, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. Danny and the rest of America and the world want the assurance from this body — that we will see this through.

The Speaker Pro Tempore: The house will be in order. The house will be in order. The house will be in order. The house will be in order. The house will be in order. The gentlelady will suspend. And the clerk will report her words. All members will suspend. The gentleman from Arkansas has demanded that the gentlelady’s words be taken down. The clerk will report the gentlelady’s words.

The Speaker Pro Tempore: The house will be in order. Members pleas take seats. The gentlelady from Ohio.

Ms. Schmidt: Mr. Speaker, my remarks were not directed at any member of the House and I did not intend to suggest that they applied to any member. Most especially the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania. I therefore ask for unanimous consent that my words be withdrawn.

The Speaker Pro Tempore: Without objection. The gentlelady’s words will be withdrawn.

On Power-Line News.

Jim Dunnigan’s Strategy Page reports the cancellation of the development of the XM8, another lightweight assault weapon chambered for the 5.56×45 mm NATO (.223 caliber), owing to growing reports from Iraq of American forces’ disenchantment with the groundhog round’s poor killing power on white-tailed deer-sized targets, i.e., human beings (Too often, enemy troops require several 5.56mm bullets to put them out of action), and because of the small round’s lack of ability to penetrate walls and doors in urban fighting.

Reports from Iraq indicate that the infamous M-16 is just as prone to jamming on account of desert dust, as it was from jungle mud in Vietnam.

Many are boiling over with anger at Congressional calls for retreat from Iraq:

Dympha calls Senate Republicans a bunch of wusses, and refers to them as the Gang of Invertebrates.

Will Malven describes the behavior of 46 Republican Senators as Cowardice Under Fire:

They waited until the President was out of the country. They waited until he was in a plane 35000 feet in the air. They waited until he was unable to respond appropriately before betraying him. Then they abandoned him to the Democrat wolves.

Mark Steyn says: I would be in favor of wrapping virtually every Republican Senator in asbestos, and using them to insulate my attic.

Van Laskey, quoted in The American Thinker,

There is no more spineless group of men than our esteemed Senate Republican leaders with the exception of Allen and Santorum. Had Rockefeller gone to Italy prior to 1941 and told Mussolini that he thought that Roosevelt was planning to aid Britain he’d have soon been looking at the business end of a noose…

And Marines are especially disgusted by calls for American withdrawal from Iraq by former USMC colonel Congressman John Murtha.:

Gunny Bob declares that Representative John Murtha soils the Corps, and urges that

John “The Jellyfish” Murtha should be shunned by all Marines and, if possible, legal steps should be taken to prevent this betrayer from being buried in a national cemetery upon his demise.

Today is really comedy day in the Blogosphere.

The Los Angeles Times had the unmitigated bad taste in liberal eyes, it seems, as to profane that newspaper’s editorial shrine by admitting the unworthy person of conservative syndicated columnist, and NRO editor-at-large, Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg’s inaugural piece has a promising opening:

STOP ME IF YOU’VE heard this already. But there are people out there — honest, decent, sincere people and deranged moonbats, too — who think that George W. Bush lied about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. No, seriously, it’s true.

Unfortunately, Goldberg immediately changes course, and turns the whole thing into a mildly amusing bit of sophistry contending that: Bush is right, even if he lied, because FDR lied the country into WWII, and we all agree in the end that he was right to do so. Therefore, we must recognize that presidents may very well need to lie on grave occasions to get the country to support hard choices and naturally intrinsically-unpopular policy decisions, like going to war.

Maybe so. And, though I did not find myself completely carried away with admiration, I recognize that syndicated columnists do have to turn in something regularly in order to collect a paycheck, and they can’t all be gems.

Over on Daily Kos, however, the incongruously named “Hunter” summons the literary equivalent of a carpet-bombing B-52 airstrike to express precisely how shocked… shocked he is to find such incivility as the opprobrious epithet of “deranged moonbats” being applied to a particular category of ideological opponents in a political editorial. “Hunter” then undertakes to fight the good fight for more and greater politesse in the political wars by donning his literary critic Halloween costume, raising a pinkie finger delicately in the air, and proceeding to find Goldberg’s prose-style wanting and his manners uncouth at very considerable length.

One is simply compelled to conclude that the term deranged moonbats must have struck a nerve.

Goldberg clearly meant by that term the sort of people on the political left who are so carried away by emotion, enthusiasm, and passion that their actual grip upon reality has become unhinged, and they have modified their own memories, and subverted their own powers of reason sufficiently as to believe that what “Hunter” refers to as speeches about mushroom clouds and African uranium really have been established in the eyes of anyone less deranged than an indubitable, barking, and likely card-carrying, moonbat to represent anything other a false line of partisan political obfuscation entered into the public debate by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whose report was actually subsequently established to indicate the exact opposite of what he said it did.

The NY Times writes:

To avoid having to account for his administration’s misleading statements before the war with Iraq, President Bush has tried denial, saying he did not skew the intelligence. He’s tried to share the blame, claiming that Congress had the same intelligence he had, as well as President Bill Clinton. He’s tried to pass the buck and blame the C.I.A. Lately, he’s gone on the attack, accusing Democrats in Congress of aiding the terrorists…

It’s hard to imagine what Mr. Bush means when he says everyone reached the same conclusion. There was indeed a widespread belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. But Mr. Clinton looked at the data and concluded that inspections and pressure were working – a view we now know was accurate.

What Mr. Clinton actually concluded may be seen in the video here.

confesses Point Five who observes:

Senate Demonstrates Republican “Big Tent” Large Enough For Anti-War Left.

Front Page interviews Bill Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector, on the missing Iraqi WMDs:

FP: Ok, so where did the WMDs go?

Tierney: While working counter-infiltration in Baghdad, I noticed a pattern among infiltrators that their cover stories would start around Summer or Fall of 2002. From this and other observations, I believe Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President Bush’s speech at West Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to prepare the younger generation of the security services with English so they could infiltrate our ranks, another was either to destroy or move WMDs to other countries, principally Syria. Starting in the Summer of 2002, the Iraqis had months to purge their files and create cover stories, such as the letter from Hossam Amin, head of the Iraqi outfit that monitored the weapons inspectors, stating after Hussein Kamal’s defection that the weapons were all destroyed in 1991…

FP: Let’s talk a little bit more about how the WMDs disappeared.

Tierney: In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land, you reply “I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof, sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.” You won’t last very long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for an educated guess).

The Democrats understand the difference between the two concepts, but have no qualms about blurring the distinction for political gain.

The Point Five blog reports:

Zarqawi, forced against his will to fight by an imperialistic US policy, pauses during his tireless struggle, to reflect on the meaning of good and evil.

Zarqawi, who has been conducting a Iranian- backed resistance against the nascent Iraqi democracy, is believed to have been fundamentally shaken by the prospect of a an official denunciation of torture by his long-time enemy, the United States. He is reportedly holed- up in a safe house in Ramadi contemplating his next move.

“This really has knocked Zarqawi on his heels,” said Peter Welker, a Middle East expert with the Welker Group. “The introduction of this legislation has sent a wave of doubt through the entire insurgency. The United States— the focus of so much of their hate— suddenly seems like a shining example of decency. They’re suddenly stopping in the middle of assembling an IED, or while strapping on a suicide belt, and questioning everything they believe. We expect to see a mass surrender of arms and a huge shift to a more political focus for Zarqawi’s group.”