The Choices:
Choice #1: They can acknowledge what is right in front of them and risk the ire of their far left, liberal base, like MoveOn.org and Code pink and the liberal bloggers that have shown they will "go after" anyone that dares speak up and tell the truth. (As they have done with Brian Baird and what they call the Bush Dog Democrats)
Choice #2: They can continue to ignore the progress and success that is being seen in Iraq and mollify their far left, liberal base, while they alienate the moderates of their party and the independents.
The Question:
Note to the rest of the Democratic politicians... eventually you are going to have to pick choice #1 or choice #2 from above because the days of ignoring it and hoping that things will go bad in Iraq are over, and it is time for you to either tell your moderates and the independents to go to hell or to tell MoveOn.org and the far left liberal, unhinged faction of your base to go to hell.
You have left yourself no middle ground. They will not let you have it both ways.
So, whats it to be Democrats?
We are waiting.
SPEAK UP, WE CANNOT HEAR YOU.
Via the New York Times we receive their answer. Petrified of their far left liberal base they would rather tell the moderates and independents to go to hell.
Democrats in Congress failed once again Friday to shift President Bush’s war strategy in Iraq, but insisted that they would not let up. Their explanation for their latest foiled effort seemed to boil down to a simple question: “What else are we supposed to do?”
In answer to that question, The Van Der Galiën Gazette, gives the answer:
How about putting petty partisanship aside and doing what’s right for the future of both America and Iraq?I have said before that the definition of insanity was to continue to try what has failed 41 times already, expecting to get a different result, just to keep the far left, liberal, unhinged portion of their party happy.
What the Conservatives, Moderates and Independents are seeing and what the Democratic politicians are doing their best to ignore is evidenced by one of the many articles we are seeing in our media, this time in Newsweek.
It is a 4 page article listing the problems, the progress and the hard road ahead in Iraq, but I am going to show you the excerpts that are relevant to this post and what is being ignored by the far left:
For the first time, however, returning to Baghdad after an absence of four months, I can actually say that things do seem to have gotten better, and in ways that may even be durable. "It's hard to believe," says a friend named Fareed, who has also gone and come back over the years to find the situation always worse, "but this time it's really not." Such words are uttered only grudgingly by those such as me, who have been disappointed again and again by Iraq, where a pessimist is merely someone who has had to endure too many optimists. It doesn't help that no sooner have I written these words than my cup of coffee spills as a massive explosion shakes our building—the first blast near our place in weeks, and the more shocking for that. We grab body armor and helmets and await the all-clear. It is "only" an IED near the entrance to the Green Zone, targeting a U.S. convoy and killing two civilians and one American soldier.
The explosion is the exception to the rule—but one of the reasons the U.S. military is gun-shy about claiming success too soon. IED attacks across the country are at their lowest point since September 2004, down 50 percent just since the surge peaked last summer. There hasn't been a successful suicide car bombing in Baghdad in five weeks, and the few ones in recent months have been small and ineffective. There used to be four a day, many of which claimed scores of lives each. "Very sustained trends," the official military spokesman, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, says cautiously. "But it's far too early to call this a statistically significant trend."
So the following observations do not come so much from the brass: Al Qaeda in Iraq is starting to look like a spent force, especially in Baghdad. The civil war is in the midst of a huge, though nervous, pause. Most Shiite militias are honoring a truce. Iran appears to have stopped shipping deadly arms to Iraqi militants. The indigenous Sunni insurgency has declared for the Americans across broad swaths of the country, especially in the capital.
Emerging from our bunkers into the Red Zone, I see the results everywhere. Throughout Baghdad, shops and street markets are open late again, taking advantage of the fine November weather. Parks are crowded with strollers, and kids play soccer on the streets. Traffic has resumed its customary epic snarl. The Baghdad Zoo is open, and caretakers have even managed to bring in two lionesses to replace the menagerie that escaped in the early days of the war (and was hunted down by U.S. soldiers). The nearby Funfair in Zawra Park—where insurgents used to set up mortar tubes to rocket government ministries, and where a car bombing killed four and wounded 25 on Oct. 15—is back in business. "Just four months ago, you could hardly see a single family here," says Zawra official Hussein Matar. One of our translators succumbed to the tears of his son recently and took him to Zawra for his 9th birthday. It was the boy's first visit to a Baghdad amusement park; the war has robbed him of nearly half his childhood.
[...]
Meanwhile, though, I can contemplate activities that were once unthinkable: like going out to dinner. Baghdad's famous mazghouf restaurants, selling barbecued river carp on the banks of the Tigris, have come back to life. At one of them, called the Karrada Sports Club, owner Mundar al Haidar recently checked the big circular pools of live carp, and watched as his workers splayed the fish on staves to grill them over a bonfire made of lemontree wood. They were preparing for the evening rush, when these days the restaurant fills to capacity. "You go out now and you feel safe," he says. "The only explosions are far away. I myself left here at midnight last night." Haidar even invited me to lunch at his home, something both of us would have considered foolhardy, even suicidal, only last summer. If insurgents didn't kill me before I left, they would have killed him after.
People who have long lived like fugitives can now do the most normal things. Zuhair Humadi, a high-ranking Iraqi official who lives in the Green Zone, recently attended a public wedding celebration in Baghdad without a massive security detail. The Shorja bazaar in old Baghdad, hit by at least six different car bombs killing hundreds in the last year, is again crowded with people among the narrow tented stalls. On nearby Al Rasheed Street, the famous booksellers are back in business, after being driven into hiding by assassins and bombs. People are buying alcohol again—as they always had in Baghdad, until religious extremists forced many neighborhood liquor shops to close.
Please read the whole thing to get a "feel" for conditions in Iraq.
The Democratic politicians can continue to try to force surrender, cut and run, retreat in defeat, call it what you will, but by burying their heads in the sand and refusing to acknowledge what even our media has felt the need to acknowledge as of late, they are alienating those moderates and independents that they will need in the next election.
Therefore they shouldn't be surprised when the time comes and they are begging for votes, when the response to those pleas will be "GO TO HELL".
[Update] Related to this, if I was surprised by Newsweek giving such a balanced report above, I am equally surprised to see cautious hope, as well as dismay over the Democrats and liberals "sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased," shown in another very unlikely place.... over at Slate:
As I began by saying, I am not at all certain that any of this apparently good news is really genuine or will be really lasting. However, I am quite sure both that it could be true and that it would be wonderful if it were to be true. What worries me about the reaction of liberals and Democrats is not the skepticism, which is pardonable, but the dank and sinister impression they give that the worse the tidings, the better they would be pleased. The latter mentality isn't pardonable and ought not to be pardoned, either.
I assure the Slate writer, Christopher Hitchens, it will not be pardoned, nor forgotten and I thank him for pointing out what we have been pointing out since we started to see signs of progress and watched the Democrats and liberals deny it at every turn.
.