William Kristol and Hugh Hewitt write some great stuff today about those few Republican Senators who are now dead set against victory. These Senators, specifically John Warner, Gordon Smith, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe, have decided to step into the shadows of Hillary Clinton when she says:
"If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will,"
They are fighting for defeat for one simple reason. Votes.
But of course these senators won’t acknowledge they’re influenced by the electoral cycle. Consider John Warner. Is he worried about 2008? No. It’s memories of Vietnam that suddenly haunt him. As the Washington Post reported on
"I regret that I was not more outspoken" during the Vietnam War, the former Navy secretary said in an interview in his Capitol Hill office. "The Army generals would come in, ‘Just send in another five or ten thousand.’ You know, month after month. Another ten or fifteen thousand. They thought they could win it. We kept surging in those years. It didn’t work."In fact, John Warner was Richard Nixon’s undersecretary of the Navy from 1969 to 1972, then Navy secretary until 1974. No admiral (or Army general) showed up in either his undersecretarial or secretarial office in those years to urge more troops for Vietnam–because we were then drawing down as part of Vietnamization. So Warner would seem to be making up these conversations with foolishly optimistic Army generals–unless they visited him before 1969 in his office at the law firm of Hogan and Hartson, where he was ensconced during the period of the Vietnam buildup.
And for this reason any, and I do mean ANY, Republican politician who votes for defeat will never get any support from me.
The men who are the only serious obstacles to her nomination are even more stridently for appeasement wrapped in willful ignorance of the enemy. This week Iranians have been captured in Gaza. They arm and direct Hezbollah. They have been engaged in the killing of Americans, and may be becoming even more bold in their provocations. They are closing in on nukes.
Even as the radical Shias headquartered in Tehran advance, the radical Sunni in al Qaeda continue to plot and to kill.
And yet all the Democrats who want to be president want to withdraw from Iraq and pretend that all is well with the world.
To this studied blindness and ruinous indifference to the facts of the threat the Congressional Republicans must provide firm and detailed arguments. The McCain-Lieberman-Cornyn resolution is far from perfect, but it isn’t defeatist or indulgent of the myth of retreat to safety. Supporting it or the Levin-Warner resolution is a stark choice that faces every Republican senator.
As I have often written and said over the past two weeks, I won’t support any Republican senator who supports Levin-Warner, and I won’t support the NRSC if it supports any such senator. Senator McConnell declared on my program yesterday that the NRSC will continue to support all incumbents regardless of how they vote on the war, so if Levin-Warner comes to a vote and Warner does not abandon his own resolution, and Senators Collins and Hagel with him, I and thousands of others will be done with the NRSC for another cycle. Either you believe the war is as serious and as dangerous as even most senators will declare, or you don’t. if you do, you cannot support the Democrats’ push for retreat at this difficult time –which will only be one of many difficult times in the years ahead.
The last thing we need after being defeated this last November is defeatist Republicans taking the reins of the party. We need those who look for solutions so that we can win, not lose and run from a difficult fight.
Do your part, contact the Senators below and be heard:
Washington, D.C. Office
248 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Tel: (202) 224-4224
Fax: (202) 224-5213
Washington Office
225 Russell Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Telephone: (202) 224-2023
(202) 224-6295 FAX
DC Office:
461 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510 Main:
(202) 224-2523
Fax: (202) 224-2693
Washington, DC Office
404 Russell Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202.224.3753
Fax: 202.228.3997
Washington, D.C.
303 Hart Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C. 20510
Phone: (202) 224-6521
Fax: (202) 228-1265
524 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-3353
Fax: (202) 228-1382
154 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: (202) 224-5344
Toll Free: (800) 432-1599
Fax: (202) 224-1946
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