I guess we will wait and see when he challenges the administration. That is when the Deputy whip thing comes into play. Voting for something that will likely fail in the Senate and thus doesn’t put GWB the head of the Party is a position they don’t want to be in does not constitute risk.

I’ll be off line for a while. I’ll drop both of you a line when I resurface. So let’s pause the conversation for a while

I think the progress is due to Democratic control of the House and Senate. I also believe he needs to be convinced that Iraq is a bigger mess the longer we stay - that is the true reality. Everything else is pretense to an exit.

It took the deaths of 634 troops to move him from the lobster comment to what you guys have deemed progress. How many more until we have real progress?

This reminds me of Algiers - the French come in, brutally crush insurgents and actually make some success in killing the insurgent leadership. A few years later they are unceremoniously booted out of the country. Why? Because they really alienated the population.

In Iraq, we are buring villages to save them. We need to stop lighting fires.

I don’t think the Deputy Whip stuff means anything — he’s voted with the Democrats more than 75% of Republicans so far this term.

I agree with you about the poison tree.

I agree with treating a person or individual with respect. I try to and expect the same from others. I agree with that but letting claims as you describe as bogus go without a challenge is not the way to go.

It insults the audience.

Re changing Randy Kuhl’s mind. He is the deputy whip of the House. He is in charge (well as in charge as a Deputy Whip can be) of securing votes for his party. Sort of hard to be independent of the party when you are gathering votes for the party.

The Republican rationale for the war is bogus so everything from those claims is like the fruit from the poisoned tree. It is poison.

Respect the Person, Challenge the claims.

In other words, I think we’ve moved passed the throwing the dynamite into the war to stir up the fish phase and into the reeling in the fish phase of this operation.

Why is this tricky. He didn’t vote to Oh I don’t know, deny, then give women the right to vote, for deny then grant civil rights for all Americans or for that matter or more to the point the Gulf of Tonkin resolution yet he is part of an institution that did so. He is also part of an institution that has corrected course over time

What matters is correcting the course we are on now. As constituents we expect him to do the wishes of the 29th. 60% of the American population want the war to end. I’m assuming that this trend is roughly right in the 29th. I’m under the impression that that a very large chuck of voters (I have to look it up but close to 50% I think) live in MC.

So no sense in prolonging the war.

I’m pretty passionate here. Why? Reasonable discussion is a good thing but buying into anything that prolongs the inevitable is frankly a waste.

Reasonable discussion does not mean benefit of the doubt. We’ve done the benefit of the doubt thing. And how has that worked out for us anyway?

What’s tricky here is that Kuhl can always say he didn’t vote for the war. And he can pretend to be a sane multilateralist.

What’s screwed up is that he supported escalation…

So Saudi Arabia is funding or appears to be funding Sunni Insurgents. I’m sure it is for self-defense. The type of funding that allows Sunnis to kill only Shia. Oh, wait, where are the majority of US causalities? In Sunni areas.

Next thing you know we will be saying Iran is responsible. Oops.

We invaded Iraq to stop Saddam from nuking us. If it was about liberating Shiites them we would have backed them in 1991 and not allowed Saddam to crush their uprising.

We made a huge mess in Iraq and frankly our presence everyday is making it worse. We are adding additional troops, speaking with neighbors and all that but we are the problem. America troop presence is the issue. Time to go.

Read Juan Cole’s blog for the ins and outs of inside Iraqi Politics. The situation isn’t pretty but he knows what he is talking about.