Poor Harry Reid. After a career of accommodating the Vegas mob and ensuring jobs, prime investments, and contracts for his family and friends, he rises to Majority Leader in the Senate. Just when he begins to bask in his importance, his masters on the left call him to heel and demonstrate his impotence. Ryan Grim reports for The Politico:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) abruptly reversed plans to compromise over Iraq legislation with Republicans after a meeting in New York where antiwar leaders pressured him to be more aggressive in ending the war.
The meeting on Monday, which was not publicly announced, showed the acute pressure that Democrats face as they try to convince this increasingly restive group that Democrats are doing everything they can to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq more quickly than President Bush wants.
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The Reid mission reflected the paradox bedeviling the anti-war movement. It is powerful enough to command constant care-and-feeding by the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates and congressional leaders. But so far it has proven largely impotent in forcing policy changes. But Democrats are now starting to do more than just patronize the movement, as Reid indicated Tuesday.
If Reid stands firm to his Tuesday pledge, he may begin to satisfy an increasingly impatient anti-war movement. Five years after the congressional vote authorizing Bush’s march to war, opponents still have had only mixed success in mobilizing a mass protest movement.
Read it all at the above link. The idea of the spineless Reid “standing firm” is pretty funny, but the consequences of his being called upon the carpet are deadly serious. As John McCain said the other day about Hillary Clinton and the MoveOn ad attacking General Petraeus, “If you’re not tough enough to repudiate a scurrilous, outrageous attack such as that, then I don’t know how you’re tough enough to be President of the United States.”
Similarly, if you have to kow-tow to a bunch of fanatics who lust for America’s defeat, you aren’t tough enough to serve in the United States Senate. Reid should retire on his ill-gotten gains and leave the leadership to those with the heart and spine to lead.
