More…

I was outside and reading Darwin’s Origin of Species when I was chased away by a rainshower. Now all of the outside benches are wet. But I’ll blog a bit and get back to reading.

I love having nothing to do!

Iraq (again)

John Kerry tries to “rally the Kossacks“:

Let’s be really clear about the Iraq vote coming down the pike in Congress this week.

I’m voting no on this bill. I’m tired of the false choices of Republicans and all the recycled spin of old battles and the political calculations that do nothing for our troops who bear the real costs of this war. Bottom line: we support the troops by getting the policy right, and this bill doesn’t do that. I’ve said it again and again and I’m not about to stop: we need a deadline to force Iraqis to stand up for Iraq and bring our heroes home, not watered down benchmarks and blank check waivers for this President. We support the troops by funding the right mission, not with a White House that opposes a pay raise for our brave men and women in uniform. Do we need to bring out the hand puppets and make the case again?

Reality about this legislation is as simple as it gets: The original Senate legislation offered a roadmap to change course in Iraq. I was proud of the progress we’d made. (I’ve still got the scars of the lonely fight Russ Feingold and I made in the summer of 2006 when we first introduced legislation to set a deadline to redeploy combat troops and only got 11 votes. But it was perseverance, not pessimism that made that a majority position less than a year later.) I’m voting no on this new version of the supplemental because it enables the Administration and Iraqi politicians to deliver more of the same.

So what do we do now that we’ve hit a bump in the road? Fold up our tents? No way – doing so would be ignorant almost of the long hard legislative struggle and forceful pressure it required to get to this point. I am determined to continue pressing this issue until President Bush changes course. Why? Because we owe our troops nothing less than a strategy that is worthy of their sacrifice.

So, yes, in this fight we threw a lot of punches, and we landed a bunch, but this is a heavyweight bout. It’s not going to be over in the first round, and this isn’t the final bell. As Kos said yesterday:

We still haven’t completely lost this Iraq supplemental battle. And if we do, instead of crying and taking your ball home, resolve to fight even harder. We owe it to our troops in Iraq, to our families, to our neighbors, to ourselves …

This movement is about fighting for what we believe in, doing the hard work to transform both our party and our nation. It won’t happen at once. We’ll have to do this incrementally one issue fight and one election cycle at a time.

Changing course in Iraq is too urgent–restoring sanity and balance to our foreign policy is too important—to be anything but disappointed with where we are right now. Every day we follow this path is another day lost, another day of damage being done to our country. I fought for a new course—I’ll continue to fight for a new course—and I know a lot of you fought with me. Believe me: we will win this debate the same way we clawed to this point – by never relenting in the pressure to change things.

Representative Louise Slaughter explains what is really going on in the House:

Friends,

This community has been so important to me, and so important to the causes we have championed together, that I didn’t want to stay quiet on such a critical day. I wanted to give you my direct thoughts about what is occurring today in the House concerning the Iraq supplemental funding.

Let me say up front that what happened today was the result of a Presidential veto and a Republican minority that doesn’t care that the American people want to end this war. That’s the context, as I see it. Now, let’s talk about the specifics.

There are two issues here. The first deals with the process by which the bill is being handled, and the second deals with the content of the legislation itself.

Let’s talk about process first, seeing as that has been receiving a great deal of attention. I’ve read that “we are watching the rise of the Dick Cheney Democrats” who “endorse governing in secret and hiding the public’s business from the public itself.”

Considering that today’s vote on the rule was entirely public, I don’t see any way in which our work can be remotely compared to a man who prides himself on rejecting the people’s right to know where he is or who he is meeting with.

But I don’t actually think that those who have made the comparison believe it at that level. They are angry at the content of our rule itself. So let’s take a look at it.

First, the rule guarantees that a modified version of the McGovern redeployment bill that received 171 votes recently will be considered during the upcoming debate on the 2008 supplemental defense spending. In other words, we are guaranteed to have another chance to vote for rapid redeployment, no matter what happens.

This rule also contains two amendments from Rep. David Obey, the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. The first amendment contains all of the critical domestic spending that the Republicans and the President had derided as pork when it was brought up the first time. What we are talking about is an increase in the minimum wage, an increase in funding for military health care and veterans’ health care, and critically needed funding for agricultural disaster aid, children’s health care, and recovery from Hurricane Katrina, among other things. We are going to have a chance to pass all of it today.

The second amendment provides funding for the war as requested by the President, along with 18 voluntary benchmarks put in place by Senator Warner.

Both of the amendments discussed above will receive public debate and consideration on the House floor, and both will be voted on independently. All of those votes, obviously, will be public as well.

Now, the point of contention as I see it, and why Democrats are being accused of dishonesty here, is that by approving the rule, we allowed the funding bill to be debated – and because virtually all Republicans will vote for it (along with some Democrats), it will pass. People are therefore saying that it doesn’t matter if we vote against the supplemental spending amendment (which many of us will). All that matters is that we allowed it to be considered to begin with.

What people wanted was for us to kill that amendment entirely. Specifically, they wanted the Rules Committee, which I chair, to shut it out.

So now, we are getting back to the real matter here – whether the Democrats should allow the House to consider legislation that funds the war without timelines and without mandatory benchmarks.

Considering I voted against the war authorization in 2002 (as did a majority of Democrats) and seeing as we have been the party that has opposed the war since its beginning, I hope that you will believe me when I say that I and my Democratic colleagues view this war as a tragic mistake that must come to an end.

The first opportunity we had to end it after November came with this bill. Our first version conditioned any future support for the conflict upon proof that our efforts there were bearing some fruit, and it would have ended the war by August, 2008 at the very latest. After the Senate weighed in, we sent the President a stronger bill that would have ended the war by March, 2008.

As you know, President Bush vetoed it. What is more, the Republicans in this Congress willfully and deliberately ignored public opinion and supported that veto. They made it impossible for us to overturn it. They kept this war going between 2003 and 2006, and they kept it going again with that vote.

As such, we had a choice. We could send Mr. Bush the same bill, or allow something to pass that wouldn’t be vetoed. And we elected to let something pass – to let Republicans, if they so choose, fund their own war.

Considering that 90% of the Out of Iraq Caucus was with us in this decision, there must have been at least some reason for it. In fact, there are two in my opinion. With this White House, and with this Republican minority, it is safe to say that a standoff with the Administration would have meant that our troops would be left in harm’s way, only now with even less funding to back them up. I don’t think that would have been right to do – to make them do even more with even less. The President doesn’t seem to care how much our troops suffer. All evidence indicates that he will make them fight if they have needed funding or not.

Secondly, a standoff would have allowed the President to keep using our soldiers as pawns, accusing Democrats of abandoning them while it is really his war that has left them to fend for themselves.

There is one way to stop this war, and that is to force Republicans to stop ignoring their own constituents. 70 percent of the public wants a change of course in Iraq, but not enough voters in Republican districts are willing to force their Representatives and Senators to vote that way. If two-thirds of the American people want to bring this war to a close, then two-thirds of the Congress should too. Democrats need to work with the overwhelming majority of the American people to make that happen.

I’m hoping that today’s vote won’t break that link between us and you – because we will only succeed if we work together.

Religion

Atheist counterattack: All of those books are selling well!

By the way, I’ve read the God Delusion (Dawkins) and have just finished The End of Faith by Harris.

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.
Christopher Hitchens’ book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.
Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful “The End of Faith” and its follow-up, “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” struck similar themes _ and sold.
“There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist,” Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. “There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying.”
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books’ success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories,” Mouw said, “but it’s almost like they all had a meeting and said, ’Let’s counterattack.’”
The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the U.S., London and Madrid, the atheists say.
As Hitchens puts it: “Religion kills.”
The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of secular panic. Nonbelievers are finally realizing that, contrary to what they were taught in college, faith is not dead, he says.
Signs of believers’ political and cultural might abound. [...]

“It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here,” said Wilson, who is debating Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has written the book “Letter from a Christian Citizen” in response to Harris. “All of this is happening precisely because there’s a significant force that they have to deal with.”
Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In an 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who say they have no religion.
Some say liberal outrage over the policies of President Bush is partly fueling sales, even though Hitchens famously supported the invasion of Iraq.
To those Americans, the nation’s born-again president is the No. 1 representative of the religious right activists who helped put him in office. Bush’s critics see his Christian faith behind some of his worst decisions and his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq.
“There is this general sense that evangelicals have really gained a lot of power in the United States and the Bush administration seems to represent that in some significant ways,” said Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame. “A certain group of people sees it that way and that’s really disturbing.”
Mouw said conservative Christians are partly to blame for the backlash. The rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been so strident, they have invited the rebuke, the seminary president said.
[...]

Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, says religion has been one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing in the last 15 years, and the rise of books by atheists is “the flip-side of that.”
“It was just the time,” she said, “for the atheists to take the gloves off.”

My two cents: Wilson is wrong; no one that I know of thought that faith is dead or is dying. But I do know that in some academic circles, well, it is downright “uncool” (lack of a better term) to admit that you are a believer. After all, among the elite scientists, only 7 percent believe in a personal god, and that number is about 40% at the non-elite level.

The question of religious belief among US scientists has been debated since early in the century. Our latest survey finds that, among the top natural scientists, disbelief is greater than ever — almost total.

Research on this topic began with the eminent US psychologist James H. Leuba and his landmark survey of 1914. He found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God, and that this figure rose to near 70% among the 400 “greater” scientists within his sample [1]. Leuba repeated his survey in somewhat different form 20 years later, and found that these percentages had increased to 67 and 85, respectively [2].

In 1996, we repeated Leuba’s 1914 survey and reported our results in Nature [3]. We found little change from 1914 for American scientists generally, with 60.7% expressing disbelief or doubt. This year, we closely imitated the second phase of Leuba’s 1914 survey to gauge belief among “greater” scientists, and find the rate of belief lower than ever — a mere 7% of respondents.

Leuba attributed the higher level of disbelief and doubt among “greater” scientists to their “superior knowledge, understanding, and experience” [3]. Similarly, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins commented on our 1996 survey, “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word because they are such alien categories of knowledge.” [4] Such comments led us to repeat the second phase of Leuba’s study for an up-to-date comparison of the religious beliefs of “greater” and “lesser” scientists.

Our chosen group of “greater” scientists were members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality). Overall comparison figures for the 1914, 1933 and 1998 surveys appear in Table 1.

But very few of us expect this trend to extend to the public at large, especially those of us who have frequent contact with non-academics and with non-elite undergraduate students.

But it is nice to see those new books and, at long last, see the taboo of not calling the absurd “absurd” falling away.

Fun stuff

Creationist Car Paint Job; to see this, check out On Evolution. The driver of this car must be proudly proclaiming that he/she is better informed than ANY of the science departments of our research universities!

Flying Spaghetti Monster: stikes a statue of Jesus with lightning!

Don’t look for any religious symbolism here – it was only a freak act of Mother Nature, says Sister Ilaria.

The nuns at Mother Cabrini Shrine in Golden were thanking God on Sunday that no one was hurt when a bolt of lightning shot out of the sky and struck their 33-foot statue of Jesus.

The lightning bolt broke off one of Jesus’ arms and a hand and damaged one of his feet, sending marble plummeting to the ground during a Saturday afternoon storm.
“There were pilgrims up there on the hill,” Sister Ilaria said. “The biggest miracle is no one got hit with the falling debris.”

I know, some egghead scientist will go on and on about electric potentials and how that tall statue provided the path of least resistance from the charged clouds to ground (or the other way, depending on how you define current), but I know that this was the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s doing.

Update A commenter on the Dawkins site alterted us to this:

Actually, the author of this cartoon doesn’t know us well. We are more likely to say: “whew, I was lucky, and I am glad that I remembered my seat belt” which is far more satisfying than saying “oh, I am so special that my deity altered the laws of physics just this one time to save llittle old me!” Of course one could wonder why that deity didn’t just prevent the accident to begin with.

But I do have one suggestion: such people (as the one that drew the cartoon) should just completely give up on things like modern medicine that undoubltly some atheistic scientists either developed or took the lead in developing.

Random Photo

sometimes I see similar things while on walks…

Iraq bill, part II

Workout Notes I did the boiling frog kind of workout; warm up at 14 minutes per mile, and then upped the incline (.5 per minute) until I was at 6, then held that for mile 2. Then lowered it until 2.75, and then increased the speed to 12 minutes per mile for the last mile.

Politics
The Democratic congress is going to try to hide its captiulation in a political trick:

TO SUM UP – MAKE SURE TO WATCH THE VOTE ON THE RULE, THAT IS THE KEY VOTE. DEMS WILL BRAG THEY ARE VOTING AGAINST THE GOP AMENDMENT, WHEN THE KEY VOTE IS ON THE RULE -D

Today is the day House Democrats are expected to vote on Iraq – except, news out of Washington this morning says the leadership has come up with a nifty little trick to try to prevent the public from seeing who voted for giving Bush a blank check, and who voted against it. If you thought Democrats were behaving like cowards by caving into a President at a three-decade low in presidential polling and giving him the very blank check they explicitly promised not to give him during the 2006 election, you ain’t seen nothing yet. We are watching the rise of the Dick Cheney Democrats – that is, the rise of Democrats who endorse governing in secret and hiding the public’s business from the public itself.

Here’s how it is expected to work today in a process only Dick Cheney could love (though you never know – it could change at the last minute). Every bill comes to the House floor with what is known as a “rule” that sets the terms of the debate over the legislation in question. House members first vote to approve this parliamentary rule, and then vote on the legislation. Today, however, Democrats are planning to essentially include the Iraq blank check bill IN the rule itself, by making sure the underlying bill the rule brings to the floor includes no timelines for withdrawal, and that the rule only allows amendments that fund the war with no restrictions – blank check amendments that House Democratic leaders know Republicans will have the votes to pass.

This means that when the public goes to look for the real vote on the Iraq supplemental bill, the public won’t find that. All we will find is a complex parliamentary procedure vote, which was the real vote. Democratic lawmakers, of course, will use the Memorial Day recess to tell their angry constituents they really are using all of their power to end the war, that they voted against the Republican blank check amendment which the rule deliberately propels, and that the vote on the rule – which was the real vote for war – wasn’t really the important vote, when, in fact, they know very well it is the biggest vote on the war since original 2002 authorization for the invasion. It is a devious, deliberately confusing cherry on top of the manure sundae being served up to the American public, which voted Democrats into office on the premise that they would use their congressional majority to end the war. To read more on these deliberately complex machinations, see Congressional Quarterly’s piece just out on the web.

Or as told on TheHill.com:

House Democrats head into their last vote on the Iraq supplemental budget today with a sense of resignation, with fewer than half expected to vote in favor of a bill that gives President Bush nearly everything he wants.

The number of Democrats likely to vote for the Iraq measure ranges from about 60 to a slight minority of the caucus, around 110.

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is expected to vote against it. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) will probably vote yes.

“With a stubborn, delusional president, we’re never going to win,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.). “We’re dealing with an administration that refuses to deal with reality. We have no way to evict him from office.”

But House Democrats also said late yesterday afternoon that they would force a September debate on two proposals governing the use of force in Iraq through the rule they set for debate on the Iraq spending bill. If the rule and the bill pass, the House would consider at the end of September legislation sponsored by Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.) requiring the secretary of defense to redeploy U.S. troops in Iraq, said a Democratic aide. The House voted down this measure last week.

The rule for the supplemental would also require lawmakers to debate legislation sponsored by Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) rescinding congressional authorization for the war.

A Republican leadership aide said the procedural tactic was highly unusual and defied the spirit of Democrats’ pledge to implement open process in the House. The aide said Democrats had not bothered to seek a September debate with Republicans.

Meanwhile, liberal activists lashed out at the deal. MoveOn.org sent an e-mail to all 3.2 million members asking them to lobby their members of Congress to vote against the deal. [...]

Democratic leaders, who view their victory in November as a mandate to end the war, sought to cast the deal with the White House as step forward in their effort to bring troops home. But Republicans said it was a clear win for President Bush.

“It looks to me like the Republican president got what he wanted,” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). “It shows he’s still pretty strong on this issue.”

But some Democrats say Republican lawmakers could lose politically because they will be casting another vote to keep the war going, just the way an unpopular Bush wants to do it.
“It will be demonstrated tomorrow, when they support the supplemental overwhelmingly, [that] it continues to be their war,” said Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.). “I don’t think anyone is awkward about having a vote like that.”

Lovely. Our local moron (LaHood) is going to come out looking good, and the war will go on.

We liberals are pathetic: Iraq Supplemental Bill

As to whether congress should approve of the supplemental bill, here is a point/counter point from Think Progress:

Counterpoint: congress should appove:

Congress should vote to enact the FY07 Supplemental, and progressives who have forced the President to change course on Iraq should vote for it. For the first time in the 5 years since the war started, the President is being forced to change course and accept something other than a blank check. He is now forced to respond to verifiable benchmarks — the fact of which Secretary Gates used on his recent trip.

The fact is that despite the hand wringing now, we all knew it would be near impossible to get the super-majorities needed in to enact hard and fast timelines for redeployment from Iraq. In fact, it was widely commented that the bare majorities in the House and Senate to pass the initial conference report were a triumph of leadership, given that the Senate Democratic Caucus could count on 49 votes and the House Democrats only 231.

Many critics of the current deal — ThinkProgress included — now suggest Congress should have somehow gotten more. They critique the inclusion of a waiver on the political benchmarks, though waivers have become standard in Congressional legislation on foreign affairs over the last several decades, so much so that even wildly popular laws enacted with overwhelming support, like the Jerusalem Embassy Act, retain waiver authority for the president.

Other critics suggest Congress should have simply kept sending the President a bill to veto, while existing funding runs out. One analysis suggested that the Food and Forage Act of 1861 would have given the President the authority to feed and arm the troops in the field, provided, of course, the President wanted to do so. A separate analysis of the same law suggested the President could simply choose to spend money to continue the war if the Congress failed to enact the supplemental — an actual occurrence of which CAP pointed out in an analysis we prepared earlier this year.

Whether you think the President might do the right thing or the wrong thing, it makes no sense for the Congress to abdicate its power of the purse, especially to this Administration on this issue.

At the end of the day, precedent demonstrates that Congress will be able to stop the war only when it has the votes to force the President to back down. Given Democratic votes alone cannot get this done, the President can only be forced to back down when significant numbers of his own party desert him in Congress. As we argued in a recent CAP paper — which ThinkProgress also used to support its case — this is going to be a prolonged effort that will require many rounds.

The good news for those who want to end the war in a way that protects our interests, there will be many more opportunities — in the Defense Authorization bill, the Defense Appropriations Bill and the FY 08 supplemental to do just that.

– Denis McDonough

Go to the link to see the sources in the above article.

Point: congress should reject.

Yesterday, congressional leaders relented and removed a timeline for withdrawal from the Iraq war spending bill.

The mainstream media reports today that war critics “handed President Bush a victory.” But this victory for President Bush is a defeat for the American people. While the new supplemental bill will likely pass, members of Congress need to use this opportunity to go on the record once more about their opposition to Bush’s course in Iraq.

With his veto, President Bush rejected a supplemental bill that required a change in course. In a similar vein, Congress should follow Speaker Pelosi’s lead and vote to reject a bill that maintains stay the course. Here’s why:

1) Maintain unity for withdrawal: Pelosi and Reid showed tremendous leadership in creating a bipartisan majority for withdrawal. That unity is now threatened. Those members “who reluctantly have backed House leaders on the Iraq spending bill may defect due to the leadership’s decision to eliminate any timeline for withdrawal from the legislation.” Furthermore, to pass the supplemental, many members favoring withdrawal may ally with conservatives who overhelmingly favor an open-ended commitment in Iraq.

2) A toothless option: The new bill will likely “incorporate the benchmarks-based provision authored by Sen. John Warner (R-VA.),” but “Bush could waive these requirements if he submits a report to Congress on why he is doing so.” The final bill is also likely to be “stripped of other features that Mr. Bush had previously resisted, including readiness standards that would have prevented troops from being returned to Iraq within one year of serving there or without adequate training and equipment.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Congressional leaders need to live up to their word and continue to fight for a change of course in Iraq. We’ve laid out four possible courses of action for them to take.

But in the meantime, anyone who supports accountability for President Bush’s Iraq policy must reject this blank check for war.

Of course, a few Senators (Kerry, Dodd, Sanders (I) and Feingold) have said that they would vote against it; Biden will vote for it and Clinton and Obama haven’t made up their minds.

This may be the big break in the Democratic race, especially if Obama and Clinton part ways.

Finally, an analysis as to why the pathetic Democrats can’t even go head to head with a President with a 28% approval rating.

Dear Kossacks,

When I lived in Jerusalem and worked with the Israeli peace movement, we described our spineless Labor Party and some of the allegedly pro-peace intellectuals as “shooting and crying”—first they’d support military action, then they’d lament how terrible it felt to be “forced to stoop to the level of violence” (allegedly by “the enemy”). Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues are now “funding and crying”—first they fund the war, then they say that they are not implicated because having abandoned their promises to not allow the Bush Administration to go ahead with another year or more of war, they now say they’ll “personally vote against the bill” that they’ve approved as a caucus.

No options? They could have mastered a majority of the caucus to agree to not call up the bill, demanded party loyalty on the issue, until the Bush Administration agreed to set a time table (remember, they were asking not for an immediate end of the war, but for an end a year from now!). And they could have mobilized their friends and allies around the country to engage in a media campaign in all districts where they worried about support—focused on why it was keeping troops in Iraq that is “abandoning the troops,” while bringing home was the only sane way to protect them.

Too many critics of the Dems will reply: “They just don’t have any backbone.” But why don’t they? The answer is not that Dems are less decent human beings or less principled than their Republican colleagues who, even in the minority, keep disciplined focus on their own principles (in this case, militarism until Iraq is safe for our oil companies and other corporate bandits).

It’s rather that the Dems lack a coherent vision and ideology from which they could derive strength of purpose that would provide the foundation on which they could easily develop a moral backbone to fight for what they believe in. Thus, for example in relationship to the war in Iraq, they talk about the inability to win, rather than about the moral failure of the paradigm of trying to bring about safety and security by military or political domination of other countries.

While Republicans proudly cling to their own ideology, Dems have allowed the term “liberal” to become a political curse, not because they ever lost an intelligent argument about liberalism, but because they have been unwilling to fight for it. They are liberal about their liberalism. So why should anyone trust the country’s defense to people who won’t fight for themselves or their own views?

Emphasis mine.

I am sorry to say that I agree with this.