Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Trouble is brewing in our nation’s capital — so goes the storyline of our national press corps, anyway.
The current debate over the pending war spending bill, the symbolic battleground for President Bush and his Congressional opponents, is being billed in the national media as a “showdown” of titanic proportions, a “fierce clash” between opposing ideologies that will determine who holds sway in post-midterm Washington. In short, it’s a legislative skirmish that will alter our war policy for the foreseeable future.
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Meanwhile, the actual war drags on and on, mostly out of sight and mind for American voters, a product of the almost total absence of shared sacrifice.
Unfortunately for those engaged in an actual, tangible clash overseas, this debate is a showdown in name only, a nominal and semantic fight over who can make the best case to the voters in 2008. The Democrats, their bill already laden with the kind of earmarked pork they promised to purge from Congress, see the installation of benchmarks and timetables as the best way to become the party that supports soldiers the most. President Bush, apparently psychologically incapable to accept any kind of compromise, lest he be seen as conceding, promises to veto any bill that includes those benchmarks. This “debate” is nothing more than an electoral chicken run, with each side hoping the other bails first.
Meanwhile, the actual war drags on and on, mostly out of sight and mind for American voters, a product of the almost total absence of shared sacrifice. Most of us are asked to give little to nothing to the war effort, keeping us from emotional investment beyond the ideological. New tactics are rolled out every few months by war planners in an effort to stem the tide of violence, a sort of New Coke way of policymaking that is so far failing. Futile strategies become little more than pop culture buzzwords for myopic planning, while touring politicians praise the “openness” of street markets as they are protected by scores of accompanying soldiers.
As we have disturbingly seen so many times before, what was supposed to be political debate has instead devolved into political theater, a scripted competition between two sets of performers. Each side jockeys for linguistic position, speaking in lofty platitudes about the “signs of progress” and “failure of leadership,” while each clamors to be seen, in carefully refined voter research, as the party with the most support for troops.
Young people are weary of the war, and not simply because we grew up in what has been termed a “holiday from history.” We are depressed instead by the shifting foundations, absence of feasible ideas and prospects for the future. While our elected leaders bloviate, the hopes of young citizens grow dimmer and dimmer.
— McKay Stangler for the editorial board
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