A Few Bulbs Short of a Chandelier

Mark Steyn addresses some of the nonsense coming out of the Dem debate and recent Dem votes in this column:

Everything's difficult, isn't it? In the Democratic presidential candidates' debate, Sen. Barack Obama was asked what he personally was doing to save the environment, and replied that his family was "working on" changing their light bulbs.

Is this the new version of the old joke? How many senators does it take to "work on" changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008.

In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Whether he was proposing a solution to global warming is unclear. But he would be impressed to hear that nine decades later the lights are going out all over Washington.

This week, both the House and the Senate voted for defeat in Iraq. That's to say, Congress got tired of waiting for deadbeat insurgents to get their act together and inflict devastating military humiliation on U.S. forces. So America's legislators have voted to mandate the certainty of defeat. They want the withdrawal of American forces to begin this October, which is a faintly surreal concept: Watching CNN International around the world, many viewers unversed in America's constitutional arrangements will have been puzzled by the spectacle of a nation giving six months' notice of surrender. But the cannier types in the presidential palaces will have drawn their own conclusions.

Read the rest of it here. So why the rush to get out of Iraq? It's really pretty simple to see. By removing all our forces from the country in April of next year, and assuming John Murtha's view that everything will just go swimmingly in Iraq after we leave, Iraq and the Dems overall view on the war on terror is removed from the presidential campaign discussions for the Fall election. The last thing Dems want is for their views on America's defense to be contrasted with those of Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson or John McCain. They're rather concentrate on compact florescent bulbs or invading countries like the Sudan where there's no compelling U.S. interest other than purely humanitarian.

If I was a purely political person I'd wish the president would sign the surrender bill and then follow through with the withdrawal because that would nearly guarantee that a genocide of Rwandian proportions would be going on in what's left of Iraq by the time the election comes around. The Dem folly would be on full display and not only would they lose the White House, they'd probably lose the Congress too.

However, it's not right to wish death and destruction on millions of good Iraqis just to prove the stupidity of a few Democrats. The Dems don't mind doing that just to advance their political goals, but I'm not going to stoop to their level.

UPDATE: Read Tarzana Joe's ode to the Senate and those who would guarantee our defeat.

UPDATE 2: Speaking of compact florescent bulbs, here's my response to plans to ban the sale of incandescent bulbs in California.