Stop whining and keep fighting

There is a lot of moaning and gnashing of teeth on the lefty blogs about the Iraq funding vote in Congress yesterday. I understand their frustration, but I don't think it is very realistic. I was going to write a post saying why, but Ezra Klein at Tapped beat me to it:

What More Could Be Done?

Like most of us who oppose the war, I'm disappointed with how the vote turned out yesterday. But I'm not exactly sure what more folks would have had the Democrats do. The political invulnerability of President Bush is, I think, a reality that hasn't quite penetrated the punditocracy. Bush is never running for office ever again. He has no political heir to protect, and is clearly uninterested in the future fortunes of the Republican Party. He is massively unpopular, and his agenda is utterly stymied in the Democratic Congress. He can literally veto the spending bills forever -- Congress has absolutely no leverage against him. And the American people, at least as I read the polls, will not support the defunding of the troops. Maybe Congress could have forced a second veto, but the idea that they could continually force Bush's veto and that would result in an eventual win seems wrong.

The more wild-eyed at the lefty blogs usually start shouting "Impeach Bush! Impeach Cheney!" at this point. But impeachment is a political process, not a legal one, and going down that road would a) not work and b) suck all the political air out of the room and kill the Democrats agenda entirely. Unfortunately, even though the Dems are in the majority, they can't grab the wheel away from the delusional President behind it. They can keep showing the American people the corruption and criminality of the Bush Administration, and that will pay off in electoral gains down the road. But there's no good way to force Bush to get the hell out of Iraq until and unless his support in his own party completely collapses. That may happen, but it hasn't happened yet, and Republicans have shown an amazing, shameful, and slavish propensity to back Bush no matter what. I think we're stuck in Iraq until Bush is out of office. In the meantime, accept the defeat, pick yourselves up, and keep fighting Bush and his criminal gang wherever you can.

And now, I tweet

I'm not big on the social networking thing; I successfully resisted stuff like Friendster and Orkut and MySpace and LiveJournal. Is it because I'm a Luddite? My misanthropy? My innate shyness (no, that's not it)? No, I think it's because I see most of those things as just being a big time suck. I'm pretty busy, and when you're a freelancer, goodness knows that there are way more than enough things that call to you and keep you from getting actual work done.

I don't do IM or text on my Blackberry Pearl, for the same reasons. I see how much time Dori spends on her Blackberry, and that's not for me. I installed the Gmail client for the Pearl, but that's different; I can choose when I want to check mail; it doesn't come after me. Same with Google Reader (via Opera Mini, a superior browser to the standard Blackberry browser) on the Pearl. I only have a few feeds, and I can check them when I'm stuck somewhere waiting around.

But I've finally succumbed to Twitter. I like it because it's a bit like blogging, and because it has a social aspect, but it doesn't bug me and I don't feel like I have to respond. I'm using Twitterific on the desktop and Twitterberry on the Pearl.

I'm tomnegrino on Twitter, if you want to add me.

Hold those legs together, girls!

Over at Ezra Klein's place, the post What I Learned From Missouri lays out the truth about many people in the anti-abortion crowd. They may want to halt abortions as a side benefit, but they really see abortions as subservient to the real goal of dictating women's sexuality.

It's based on events in Missouri, where the legislature voted down funding for contraception at the behest of anti-abortion groups:

The House voted 96-59 to delete the funding for contraception and infertility treatments after Rep. Susan Phillips told lawmakers that anti-abortion groups such as Missouri Right to Life were opposed to the spending...

'If you hand out contraception to single women, we're saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that,' Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview.

The post goes on to say:

But I've come to see that the people who decide how major 'right to life' organizations operate have goals far less noble than the protection of innocent life. For all their lofty rhetoric, they're trying to create a world where being a sexually active single woman is punished by forced childbirth, or by cancer. There may be more destructive people in American politics, but there are none I hate more.

This is all of a piece with the Texas GOP scumbags I blogged about in April. It's not about the babies. It's about controlling the women.