The 20 Billion Dollar Question

Democrats are insisting that the country is behind their attempts to end the war. If this is true then why did they need to tack $20 billion in unrelated spending into the bill? President Bush is asking this, also.

The Democrats have themselves boxed in. Their base is expecting a withdrawal from the war but the way they are doing it is likely to come across as not supporting the troops.

Even if everything works out the way they want as it did 30+ years ago when they de-funded Viet Nam, it will still bite them. They made out pretty well in the late 1970s, taking the White House and gaining a big majority in Congress but much of this was a reaction to Watergate rather than the war.

By the early 1980s, resentment over the way the war ended was boiling up. The movie Rambo brought it to a head. The new common wisdom was not that we were defeated in Viet Nam but that our leaders in Washington hadn't let us win the war.

Since Democrats ended the war and had associated themselves with the peace movement, people stopped trusting them with national security. This still cost them as recently as 2004. If they force a pull-out from Iraq and things go as bad as expected without us stabilizing the country, it might be another 30 years before anyone trusts Democrats with national defense (Clinton won on domestic issues during the period of peace between the end of the Cold War and recognition of the Long War).