Turkey and Armenia; or, Adult Supervision Needed in Congress

You gotta hand it to the Democrats. How a party that essentially hates the American people and the country's military ever got control of Congress remains a mystery to me, save for the fact that the Republicans paid the price for spending like drunken sailors during the last election cycle.

The mystery deepened over the last few days as the House passed a resolution condemning the Turks for "genocide" vs. the Armenians over 100 years ago. This brilliant move verges on treason.The sole reason for its passage was to embarrass the Bush Administration and make it more difficult for General Petraeus to achieve victory in the current Iraq chapter of the Global War on Terror. Not surprisingly, it probably scored House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a few points with her Armenian constituents.

Hey, don't get us wrong. The Ottoman Empire, in its waning days, went out of its way to whack the Armenians, and no, like slavery or the Holocaust, it was not a good thing. But, like Bill Clinton's bogus apologies to Africa for injustices in the distant past, this idiotic Congressional resolution is a symptom of what the Democrats and their pals in Hollywood and the media do best: making completely pointless and highly public proclamations of their moral superiority in a way that makes them appear like saints while costing them nothing. Where the hell is the adult supervision up there on Capital Hill?

We are not amused at this adolescent bravado. Neither is Thomas Sowell who sees right through it:

If Congress has gone nearly a century without passing a resolution accusing the Turks of genocide, why now, in the midst of the Iraq war?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this resolution is just the latest in a series of Congressional efforts to sabotage the conduct of that war.

The Armenian resolution needlessly and pointlessly pisses off the Turks at precisely the point we don't need this in the Iraq conflict. It may force the Turkish government to save face by refusing to allow our military to use that country as a transit point for military supplies. Further, it may force the Turkish government to feel compelled to cross the Iraqi border and pummel our longtime Kurdish allies whose friends, unfortunately, continue to cause a lot of problems in territorial Turkey.

The irresponsibility of the Democrats here is truly breathtaking. They are literally subverting the Commander-in-Chief and the military of the country they themselves have sworn to defend.How treasonous is that? But it's also par for the course, because, as we well know, it's all about Bush, something that Sowell clearly recognizes:

Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush's war -- and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war.

In a rare but revealing slip, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said that an American victory in Iraq "would be a real big problem for us" in the 2008 elections.

The resolution is unhelpful in another way as well. It has exacerbated the enormous, speculative hikes in the price per barrel of oil, which is going to hit Americans in the pocketbook and help tank our economy while encouraging inflation. All at a time when the huge ripple effect of the subprime mortgage crisis is undermining the entire economy.

But the Democrats simply don't care. Unable to "defeat" General Petraeus and our exceptional armed forces by playing games with military funding and operational capabilities, they're trying to earn points with their Stalinist friends by causing other kinds of trouble. The object, of course, is to put Americans out of work; rout our soldiers on the field; and cause so many calamities to come to a head in 2008 that the Dems will cakewalk to a hat-trick victory next November.

Lose your job? Lose your house? Lose your loved ones in the military because they couldn't get supplies in time? Who cares? The Democrats will be back in power again and will be able to pick up where Bill Clinton left off by stacking the Supreme Court with Marxist justices; creating a Eurostyle Hillarycare entitlement which will work as well as the disastrous Euro-solution does; and de-funding our military to the point where they won't even be able to keep our borders safe let alone pursue Al Qaeda and make sure Iran doesn't get nukes.

Or, as Sowell observes:

Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, Congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations -- and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.

Choose your description. Republicans need to get their act together. The last thing we need in a time of war is a nation run with the sense of high seriousness you'd expect from adolescents who are busy trying to cut class, the better to ignore the time-consuming problem of growing up and becoming responsible adults.

Read the rest of Sowell's excellent piece here.