Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) gave this address on the House floor, one that has been making the rounds lately and is well worth noting here:
It is not courageous to be against this war — that is now the majority position. It takes real courage to admit the consequences of our actions now, and Rep. Johnson is one of the few who has the political courage to say what’s right. We urgently need more of his kind at this crucial moment in our history.
“I wholeheartedly support withholding funds… Although it is a drastic step and ties the President’s hands, I do not feel like we have any other choice. The President has tied our hands, gone against the wishes of the American people, and this is the last best way I know how to show my respect for our American servicemen and women. They are helpless, following orders.
…
Thirty years ago when I was sent to Vietnam in a similar situation, Vietnam started out as a peace type mission, no defined goal, no exit strategy, no idea whose side we were on, and a created incident to gain support of the Congress. A peacekeeping mission? Come on. Does this not sound just like a carbon copy? I think it is.”
-Sam Johnson, 1995
Funny how “courage” seems to be dependent on who’s in the oval office.
Of course, this goes for both parties. If Al Gore had been in office and invaded Iraq, the Democrats would have lined up behind him like the Supreme Soviet.
That quote is another reason why one should never trust anything one reads from a leftyblog these days.
Rep. Johnson made that comment on the House floor on December 13, 1995 against the military action in Bosnia. That was before US troops were on the ground there.
Rep. Johnson’s comments are different in two ways from Rep. Murtha’s: first, he was trying to prevent a conflict from happening in which US troops were not yet involved, and secondly he wasn’t being disingenuous about his aims in doing so.
Murtha wants to cut off the US military at the knees and force a victory for al-Qaeda, and he is trying to do so in a way that doesn’t make it clear what he is trying to achieve.
If we lose in Iraq, al-Qaeda gets the biggest victory they have ever had.
The Democrats want to shoot at the President, and they’ll end up taking the country down in the process.
Good points; but I’d still bet good money that the roles would be reversed if we were immersed in a conflict that had been a Democrat’s doing.
Ouch. Looks like he got you there, Reding.
And I find it doubtful that if the tables were turned that most Democrats would still behind a hypothetical President Gore who invaded Iraq. Were most Democrats behind LBJ in 1968? The Democratic Party constituency is fundamentally different than Republicans in many ways. Mindless and unreasonable hawkishness is not gonna be celebrated by the majority of Democratic voters.
BTW, I didn’t get it from a lefty blog; I got it from reason.com… admittedly, they don’t like Bush or the Iraq War much over there, but last I checked, they were still fairly center-right in the scheme of things.
Hmm… Reason usually does their research before posting things… then again, everybody slips up from time to time…