Feb. 4, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

“Stop the hissing,” is what I kept saying to our cats as warily they circled one another for several days in some kind of agitation. The female cat spent a day at the local veterinarian for minor surgery and came home bearing new and apparently threatening scents. My wife kept telling me to stop telling them to stop hissing. “They’re just operating on instinct,” she said wisely. “They’re just being themselves.”

So does that mean members of the U.S. Congress constitute a collection of instinct-driven felines who, circling each other with suspicion and occasional hissing, are operating on political instinct instead of behaving as if they were human with critical work to do on behalf of the American public and, by extension, its fellow citizens across the globe?

It is said that the Democrats, elevated to legislative leadership by an electorate sick to death of the war in Iraq, evidently feel they are being taunted by the Republican minority. (Isn’t that a delicious prepositional phrase?) The result is pusillanimity in the matter of exercising the power of the purse. The Dems don’t want to be caught out not “supporting our troops,” so let’s have no talk of cutting off any funding of the war lest, if the party nominates a woman for President, it will be said that its members have gone girlie on defense.

So can it be that even after 3,060-plus American military dead, the Democrats will let themselves be hissed into submission by the Republicans just to make running safer for Ms. Rodham Clinton?

Last November millions of voters in America appeared to have held George W. Bush responsible for the disaster in Iraq. If the Democrats do not now rally to attempt to shut down the war, the electorate should hold them responsible the next time around. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. And it is as wrong as rain to send more young Americans into the meat-grinder of a Middle Eastern civil war.

It can certainly be said that the U.S. started that civil war, but it certainly didn’t cause it. The iron rule of Saddam Hussein had held the hissing felines of the Shi’a and the Sunna apart for a lot of years. It was the U.S. “shock-and-awe-but-don’t-worry-they’ll-greet-us-with-rose-petals” strategy that kindled the tinder of a millenium’s worth of clan resentment.

The Democrats might have their own rose parade if they were simply to stand up and say, “Enough. Not one more life put on the line.” I blanched at some of the ages of the 3,046th through the 3,060th service members killed-in-action as reported in the New York Times of January 26th and 27th: 24, 20, 21, 24, 21, 19 (!), 23, 20. What the hell are we doing?

There is much talk of bipartisanship in this newly convened Congress of hissing cats, about how the two parties can and ought to work together for the good of the nation, etc. etc. And, yes, a significant number of Republican House members did vote for the Democratic bill that would raise the minimum wage – though perhaps they did so knowing some of their counterparts in the Senate would insist on tying small-business tax relief to the increase, thus stalling one of the more decent pieces of legislation to come down the chute in a while. Have you ever tried to plumb the mind of your house cat?

In a culture that has elevated the free-market philosophy to almost creedal certitude, it is difficult for most politicos to think beyond the next election – which begins one nanosecond after the previous one. Competition is everything. Vend your wares today, for tomorrow may be too late. Here it is only six weeks into 2007 – only 12 weeks since the last general election – and I’ve lost count of all the announced presidential hopefuls.

Yes, some of us think it would be a grand and glorious thing for the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have another four to eight years in the White House starting January 20, 2009. But what long-term difference would that make if, to get there, so much is compromised, so many larger issues are finessed in a process that could look a lot like my two cats just being themselves?

If ever there were a time for political heroes to emerge, it is now. I’m terribly sorry for the people of Iraq, sorry that my nation lied us into an invasion of their country on the premise of defusing Saddam’s non-existent WMDs. I’m sorry that the ensuing conflict has well-nigh ruined their country. I’m sorry that George W. Bush’s loopy vision of an Ozzie and Harriet democracy just won’t work there right now, if ever. It sure as hell isn’t working here right now, either.

But we’ll know that it is working when the evacuation of U.S. troops from Iraq begins in earnest – the American people having spoken.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.