Funding Battle Highlights American Embrace of Moronitude

ORLANDO–I’m against the war. Who isn’t? (Maybe the two percent who tell The New York Times/CBS poll that Iraq is going “very well.”) But this column isn’t about the war. It’s about logic.

In his new book Al Gore argues that Americans are losing the ability to, well, argue. “Reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions,” claims the President-in-Internal-Exile. Never mind left versus right; irrationality has become so prevalent that outlandish jingoism and sentimental lunacy have displaced reason as the framework of our national dialogue. What passed for debate on the latest funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes a convincing case for Gore’s thesis.

The 2006 midterm sweep was widely interpreted as an electoral mandate to end the war. Democrats were supposedly now in the driver’s seat on Iraq. So why do they keep steering right, as if November never happened? Despite Democratic control of both houses of Congress and polls that show widespread contempt (76 percent) for the war and Bush (63 percent), party leaders felt they had no choice but to give Bush exactly what he wanted: another $100 billion, no strings attached.

Even for the majority that believes invading Iraq was a mistake, there are several reasonable, even liberal, arguments for staying the course: preventing a bigger civil war, keeping the conflict from spreading into other Middle Eastern nations, honoring our commitment to rebuild a country we’ve destroyed, the superpower’s strategic imperative of flexing its military prowess just because. Logic, however, never entered the debate. Instead, an absurd rhetorical turd carried the day, among prowar Republicans and reluctant Democrats alike: supporting the troops requires funding the war.

“Like it or not, we ran out of options,” said David Obey, the Democratic chairman of the House appropriations committee. “There has never been a chance of a snowball in Hades that Congress would cut off those funds to those troops in the field.” Even Hillary Clinton, one of just 14 senators who voted no, said she’d thought “long and hard” about her vote because she wanted to “do everything we can to protect the troops.”

(Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.)

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