CT Blue

Periodically I get emailed “rants” from my old friend Steve Fournier who blogs at Current Invective. The newest email is not on the site, so assuming Steve has no objection to somewhat wider distribution of his rants, I’m going to reproduce it here:

Turkey on House Menu

Are they merely pandering to Armenian-Americans in a few key states, or are House Dems really trying to sabotage the president’s military adventure by impairing his relations with Turkey, one of his first-tier facilitators? Turks threaten to interrupt U. S. access to their air and land if Congress issues a condemnation of Turkey’s treatment of Armenians while Europe was busy with World War I.

Giving official recognition to an atrocity committed by people that have been dead for 50 years is not going to do much to improve Americans’ quality of life, and the sanctimony of the whole exercise, coming as it does from public officials who have personally reduced two countries to rubble for no reason, is enough to make you gag.

It can’t be that the Democrats (along with their loyal acolytes in the embedded mass media) are unaware that the move to condemn the Ottoman Empire comes a bit late for the people of the USA. We have worries more immediate than the events of 1915, a bloody year the world over, and our own history as a champion of human rights is spotty. Three hundred years of black slavery and the extermination of the indigenous peoples of a vast continent may disqualify us to pronounce on the genocides of others.

If the purpose of this empty resolution is to damage relations with Turkey and thus deny Bush a staging area for operations in Iraq, it’s not a sound or reliable way to end the occupation. The way to end the occupation is the way we ended the occupation of Vietnam: by cutting off the money. If 218 Dems in the House or 51 Dems in the Senate refuse to vote for money to continue the occupation, the occupation will end promptly.

Passing futile measures provoking Turkey to play hardball with Bush is a corrupt and dangerous course, and Dems should be held accountable for it.

The Democrats can talk all they want about having held numerous vote during this Congress, but in the main, and on the major issues, they have been reduced to futile gestures, such as this resolution. I have mixed feelings about it on the merits, but it does seem to be somewhat ironic that our Congress votes to condemn a near ancient genocide while it spinelessly votes to continue a war, in which it was complicit from the start, that is killing untold, and mostly innocent, Iraqis. What was it Jesus said about motes and beams? The condemnation might carry a little more moral weight if it came from an organization that didn’t have blood on its hands.

Like the Roman Senate in the age of the Caesars, our Congress is allowing itself to be reduced to a hollowed out institution, in which the forms continue while the substance is eaten away. We see more of this today. The House voted overwhelmingly to condemn the State Department for refusing to provide information about corruption in Iraq. Of course, Congress has no intention of actually doing anything about the contempt the State Department has demonstrated toward the theoretically preeminent branch of our government. These empty gestures do nothing but underscore its own enfeeblement.