William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

As Democrats stand shattered like deer in the headlights immobilized whenever the silly line “soft on terrorism” is bandied about, some old-school conservatives have started to make their case - George W. Bush and his neo-con dream team are not one of them.

From the New York Times:

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham cornered their partner, Senator John W. Warner, on the Senate floor late Wednesday afternoon.

Mr. Warner, the courtly Virginian who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, had been trying for weeks to quietly work out the three Republicans’ differences with the Bush administration’s proposal to bring terrorism suspects to trial. But Senators McCain, of Arizona, and Graham, of South Carolina, who are on the committee with Mr. Warner, convinced him that the time for negotiation was over.

The three senators, all military veterans, marched off to an impromptu news conference to lay out their deep objections to the Bush legislation. Mr. Warner then personally broke the news to Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, and the next day the Armed Services Committee voted to approve a firm legislative rebuke to the president’s plan to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions.

It was a stinging defeat for the White House, not least because the views of Mr. Warner, a former Navy secretary, carry particular weight.

This is great news for the many Americans worried that Bush would ram through two bills — Bush’s plan to reinterpret the Geneva Convention and Arlen Specter’s FISA bill — that would both give him unprecedented power, as well as further diminish the U.S.’s reputation both home and abroad.

“There are three branches of government, not one,” said Graham.

Earlier in the day, Joe Scarborough jumped into the fray, and, no matter how much it obviously pained him, came to the realization that a House divided is most likely what is necessary for the U.S. Congress, as spending under the current Republican regime has made Bill Clinton look like George Costanza.

Scarborough penned a column, “And we thought Clinton had no self-control” for Washington Monthly:

When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.

“Count me in!” was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.

Democrats should well take a lesson from these two separate items: when you believe in something and/or were voted in for those beliefs, then have the balls to stand up for them. Listen to the will of the people.

–WKW

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.