The Chickens Come Home To Roost

About two hours ago, a reporter named Thomas Ferraro posted an article on Reuters stating that the approval rating of the Democratic Congress, installed on January 3, 2007, is actually lower than that of President Bush. I somehow suspect that will not be the lead-in for a CNN story, but it is worth contemplating the obvious question, "Why?"

And I have the answer to that question. Grab your socks and hose and tug: it's because the Democrats who took over Congress last year lied, plain and simple. You read that correctly. After three years of a steady drumbeat accusing Bush of lying about WMDs in Iraq (even though some of their more amibitous politicians voted for it before they voted against it, hee hee), it has taken less than six months to expose the entire party as a fraud. Now quite frankly, I'm not surprised about this. It did dawn on me, however, that the die hard support for the Democrats must come from people who have never taken a course in Government or read the United States Constitution.

You see, the Democrats promised last fall that if they were given power, they would end the Iraq War. I was hissing, "Liar, liar pants on fire" for a good reason: the Constitution says that George W. Bush is the commander-in-chief and doesn't need their approval to send troops wherever he wants. So the notion that they could stop the war if they wanted to do so was laughable. But apparently, the same people who don't understand the Electoral College don't seem to understand this inconvenient truth (to use the Al Gore cliche), either. Now it is true that they could cut off funding for the war, but they just declined to do that, and does anyone REALLY think they are going to do so CLOSER to the 2008 election? It would be political suicide.

The simple fact is that the Democrats won 30 seats in Congress because Bush was in his sixth year in the White House. This virtually always happens. It happened to FDR and Ronald Reagan, the two greatest Presidents of the 20th century. It didn't happen to Clinton but only because he lost more in his 1994 mid-term election than Reagan lost in 1982 and 1986 combined. They didn't win because people liked what they said; they won simply because they weren't Republicans and people were mad at the GOP.

I warned the day after the electionn last November that the Democrats were going to find out the hard way that it's a whole lot easier to sit back and blame the party in power for the problems and win than it is to actually be held accountable for your own action or non-action. Blaming Bush is not going to accompolish much in 2008 since he's on the ballot.

The Democrats are in the doldrums. Don't expect it to get better any time soon.