So the
SOTU has come and gone. You've had a couple of months to think about it, and your "first 100 hours." You scored easy points, now its time to do some real work.
On, for example, Iraq.
The latest is a resolution from the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee claiming a lack of support for the "Surge" option President Bush has put forward. Of course, what is lacking is any
alternative to that plan.
Now
c'mon guys. Let's talk about specifics. You don't like the war?
Ok. Have the stones to
cut off funding for it. That would be your Constitutional
perogative, and its how you actually walk your talk.
But the truth is that you'd then be on the hook for the results, isn't it? If we then had an attack on US soil a year later, who'd be held responsible?
You.
And that scares you.
Because you know - deep in your hearts - that this is precisely what would likely occur.
So you want to bitch and moan, but you don't want to take responsibility.
Guess what? Your clock ran out on that option after the elections. Remember? You were sent to Washington in the Majority because you said "Bush Sucks", and the American people said "yes, he does."
Great - now show us
your way forward. Don't talk about "phased redeployment" - tell us
exactly what you want to do with the troops that are there,
exactly what you're prepared to do with Iraq,
exactly what you're prepared to do with Homeland Security.
And while you're at it, we've got a few more questions for you. For example:
- There are some people who assert that 25 Americans are killed every day by illegal immigrants. I can't substantiate that figure, but in Los Angelas it is frequently reported that large percentages (perhaps more than half) of the gangbangers are illegal immigrants. Certainly, those people do commit murders. Consider that the number of murders a year in the United States is about 16,000. If illegal immigrants are responsible for more than 1200 of them - or about three a day - they are overrepresented in the population compared to their per-capita figures (20ish million illegal immigrants .vs. 260 million population.) What do you intend to do to stop the invasion of illegal aliens? This not about "amnesty" or "guest worker" programs - we can talk about those, but its not the central point. The central point is stopping the invasion across our southern border. What do you intend to do about it? Nothing? That's not acceptable.
- You want universal health care (Obama, Hillary et.al) and other expansive social programs. How do you propose to pay for them?
- You claim to care about the American worker. How come your minimum wage bill exempted American Samoa, where the tuna industry has two huge processing plants, and they pay below the old federal minimum wage - say much less the new one! Yeah, yeah, I know Pelosi got called on it and backpedalled. Let's see what's in the actual bill, and perhaps you can explain why it wasn't fixed BEFORE Rush Limbaugh pointed out your hypocrisy!
- Lobbying/earmark reform. Why is it that we keep passing spending bills that have earmarks in them that those who vote for them have never seen? That's unacceptable - and you've refused to fix it.
The American People are indeed fed up. We're fed up with politicians who will say anything to get elected, and then immediately break their word once they're in office. We're tired of it, and we don't really much care which political party is doing it.
You said you were going to put a stop to this nonsense.
So far, we've seen nothing to suggest that this was anything more than a standard campaign lie.
