The Shameful Cowardice Of Democrats And Progressives

(Via Ken MacLeod) Once again, it's time for me to remind our vast audience to resist the call to war with Iran.

Ken links to Arthur Silber writing about the latest outrage. (Here's Dover Bitch writing at Digby's Hullaballoo on the same topic.) One place you will not find any mention of this story is in the websites operated by those oh-so-chastened liberal Democrats who initially supported the Iraq invasion and only too-late decided that it was a mistake, e.g. The Washington Monthly, etc.

Seriously, people. Unless a very public wave of serious negative attention develops, we are going to be faced with a catastrophe that will make the utter fustercluck in Iraq looks like a minor screw-up. My local Democratic congressman, Tom Lantos, ignored yet another letter pleading for him to be reasonable, but I didn't expect much. He was a leading sponsor of this idiocy in the House of Representatives.

COWARDS! SPINELESS PINHEADS! 97-0 in the Senate. 411-2 in the House.

Let me simplify the message for you: the Congress has, for all practical purposes, now done everything amounting to a Declaration of War against Iran with the sole exception of authorizing the deployment of force— which the President has repeatedly stated for the record he regards as already having been granted. The Bush Administration's protofascist shitfiends are gearing up to launch a major military escalation against Iran, and THE POLICY DEBATE IN CONGRESS IS ALREADY OVER.

Friends, if you want to stop the war and stuff, you gotta sing loud!

Ken's right. If we don't stand up and devote 100% of our attention to shutting down this misbegotten stupidity, we will have no one to blame but ourselves when our lifestyle management strategies completely collapse from the sustainability pressure. You no longer have the luxury of distancing yourselves from the unpleasantry of others on the antiwar side of the ramparts because you find their rhetoric unsavory or you don't like the smell of their box lunches. Save your whining about the disagreements you have with the Marxists and the Libertarians and everybody else until after we STOP THE WAR WITH IRAN. We can return to our erudite intellectual discussions about racism, private capital and, yes, even global warming, when we're done with what really is a higher short-term priority.

Okay? Thanks. Now go spread the word.