MTSU Sidelines

Issue date: 3/26/07 Section: Opinions

Despite the growing number of protests against the Iraq war and the "mandate" Democrats in Congress received in November, legislators are accomplishing vexingly little to help end the war by extricating the troops, rather than egressing through Iran.
This seems in part to be the fault of overreaching Democrats whose election hinged on opposing the war. They appear unwilling to compromise with those moderate Republicans whose support for the war is waning but who are unwilling to go as far as their Democratic counterparts to end it.
The result is a whole lot of noise and nothing binding. While House Democrats turn up the volume on plans to pull troops from Iraq, their legislation has little chance of getting through the more contentiously held Senate, and the White House has made clear its intention to veto any such bill that crosses the president's desk.
An unfortunate side effect here is, for all their anti-war posturing, Democrats are accomplishing little to actually force President George W. Bush to end this mess. Although the Senate will likely insure he never even has to veto such a bill, his early threat to do so reflects genuine fear of any legitimate opposition to his cause.
Regrettably, it seems unlikely Democrats will capitalize on this weakness by embracing a sufficiently moderate stance to win the allies across the aisle they'll need to make anything stick. Loudmouth partisan rhetoric is what got them elected, so why mess with a winning strategy?
The resulting impasse lays bare an intrinsic flaw with our two-party representative democracy. A country's future should never be limited to only two options, especially when they're about as different as Coke and Pepsi. Republicans and Democrats are barely distinct from one other, and even then it's mostly by marketing.
Fitting American values to a one-dimensional spectrum is a fool's task, as vulgar as it is meaningless. One needn't be politically radical to find her choices severely limited by our binary democracy.
Here in Tennessee, this was readily visible during the last election. The Democratic candidate was ostensibly for the war and against gay marriage and abortion, while the Republican candidate was the same, only more so.
See also: The 2004 presidential election, when the frontrunner for either party favored continuing the war in Iraq. None of the above, please?
Clearly, the current system affords us little to decide beyond which puppet will fail to represent our interests for the next few years, yet the presence of an illusory choice seems enough to satisfy the vast majority of us, willfully ignorant and apolitical as we generally are.
After all, apolitical ignorance is bliss, while the current political landscape is utterly depressing. With the Bush administration assuring Americans it will do everything it can to circumvent attempts to halt its increasingly unpopular and unproductive war, we have plenty to worry about beyond the deadlocked Congress.
The most recent debacle over federal prosecutors being fired for political reasons results from the renewal of the Patriot Act - which never should have passed in the first place - where a provision was quietly added enabling the attorney general to appoint such prosecutors without Senate confirmation, further undermining democratic leadership.
Coming on the heels of Lewis Libby's conviction for obstruction of justice, this seems to reflect an administration with very little desire to represent the interests of the American people, and even less competence at effectively concealing its own sinister and unconstitutional agenda.
Indeed, the seditious avarice of such men as Cheney and Rove is evident, but the United States seems to simply prefer the blinds drawn to such matters. We'll be duped yet again, if we allow it.
Surely there must come a time when we as Americans will recognize our national identity is being maligned by the selfish ambitions of madmen at the helm of an absurd war. As the current Congressional standstill on the matter shows, in such circumstances we cannot rely upon our so-called democracy to right this horrible wrong.
With thousands of Americans and tens of thousands more Iraqis dead, and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted for reasons still unexplained, America cannot endure much further abuse. The potential damage between now and January, 2009, is incalculable.
Let's not wait until then to demand better.

Daniel Potter is a senior journalism major and can be reached at dgp2h@mtsu.edu.

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