Call Their Bluff

Following up on Pesky's call to Fuck 'Em (below), today we see that when the chips are down Bush always raises. When he's holding nothing, he goes all in, again and again.

So whether it's his call to expand the previous law granting nearly unlimited spying authority, John Warner's backstabbing of the troop rotation bill, or the resotration of habeus corpus, the fact of the matter is that Democrats need to call their damn bluff.

When Harry Reid led his band of merry vacationers to cave on Bush's wiretapping program in August, their cave only bought them a kick in the teeth today, with Bush saying Congress must carve even deeper into the Constitution to truly remove the dangerous rot of liberty.

One time in six years have the Democrats called Bush's bluff and that was on Social Security. And they only did that when forced to. As seems always to be the case, they entered the Social Security debate after the 2004 election with their pants already around their knees and had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the proctologist's table after an overwhelming majority of voters said no to Social Security reform.

Bringing troops home from Iraq is a winning proposal - they should call Bush's bluff on this and force him to veto reasonable troop rotations. They should force Senate Republicans to actually filibuster habeus corpus - make them bastards stay up all night defending the rights of the police state. They should tell Bush to stuff it on warrantless wiretapping - make him veto a bill making it illegal for the police to listen in on Grandma and Grandpa's telephone calls.

These are hands a dog could play. When are Democrats going to pull up their pants and stop playing not to lose?

Update: Why can't the Democrats force the Republicans to actually filibuster? According to Democratic consultants before the 2006 elections, actually filibustering something like Alberto Gonzalez's nomination would have been political suicide because the American people wouldn't stand to have Congress deadlocked over some silly partisan politics. So now that Democrats are in charge, why not force Republicans to commit political suicide by deadlocking Congress over some silly partisan politics?

I don't get it. I just don't get it.

One witnesses these things and one can't help but wonder: do they even want to win, or are Democrats the political equivalent of the Washington Generals?