It appears that a cloture vote on DADT may happen in the Senate as soon as this afternoon. If the 60 votes materialize, as it seems they will, this will be a huge win for progressives, all the more astonishing for coming after the big election defeat last month. My son, Tobias, has been working all out for this moment for years now, and he has become very much the point man on the issue as an unpaid outside consultant for the White House. If this does happen, I don't want to hear any thing but hosannas from my fellow lefties.
Let me point out that this is the culmination of a carefully planned and brilliantly executed White House strategy, the key to which was the months long survey of military opinion that boxed opponents in, lined up the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs, and isolated John McCain, who was reduced to telling an admiral with forty years of active service that, because he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he did not "command troops." This from a pampered screw-up, son of an admiral, who crashed four planes in training before he was shot down and spent six years as a prisoner of war.
Because of Tobias, I take this one personally. If you want to snark about it, go to another blog.
I'll snark, but on our side's behalf. Doesn't this indicate just how awful McCain would have been as a president?
ReplyDeletePerhaps, had he been elected, this recent rise of wildly reactionary attitudes on the right wouldn't have happened. (I agree with some of your earlier suggestions, Professor Wolff, that the Tea Party developments are due as much as anything else to the fact that we have a black president.) And perhaps part of McCain's pettiness is really just his being a sore loser.
Still, he's been so irrational and stubborn about DADT; it helps to put the left's complaints about Obama in perspective -- the only real alternative in 2008 would have been awful.
Because you've asked for no contrary comments, I'm just going to post a link to a debate with Dan Choy, against another radical leftist on the issue. If people want to rea it they can...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/22/does_opposing_dont_ask_dont_tell
Screw it link won't work
ReplyDelete