The Boehner of the Week

Today in the Iraqi non-civil (uncivil?) war, 79 Iraqis lost their lives in one attack. Our ambassador in Iraq, one of the few honest voices within the Administration, warns that Iraq faced the possibility of sectarian civil war. So what does our Administration need to know that their policy has failed? Anyone know the Iraqi for Gettysburg? Their civil war will not be a set-piece, battlefield civil war, rather a slow burning fuse, twenty people dead here, fifty there. The war has started. Our troops have retreated to garrisons. By the end of the year, they will retreat to Kuwait, the Republicans will claim a great victory and the smoldering civil war of our making will continue and casualties will mount. The most disturbing development in Iraq is that we're no longer the enemy. Shiite is Sunni enemy and vice versa. In the shadow of the 79 deaths, the State Department predicts rapid progress in forming an Iraqi unity government. Prediction: Iraq will become another Afghanistan, a US-patrolled zone around the capital with no government outside, another failure of Bush's imperial policies.

We could use a unity government here. Frist was unable to get his boys to stop offering superfluous amendments to the immigration bill, flawed as it was, and Democrats stood firm against making it into a witch hunt against those who served our needs as long as it was convenient. The GOP is in tatters and as beasts of prey do when one of their members is injured, they turn on him. Frist is proving about as effective at leadership as he was in diagnosing persistent vegetative states. In the Boehner of the Week, the House couldn't even pass a budget resolution despite the Republicans' fifteen seat advantage - they're tearing themselves apart. Now if only the Democrats could get a strong unity message out.... How I'd love two years of investigations of Bush that would make the Republican witch hunts against Clinton, incidentally the most investigated and least indicted cabinet in modern history, look gentle. On immigration we see what can happen when the Democrats stand up to Republican bullying. I hope to see more of it in the days to come.

Incidentally, the Center for American Progress estimates the cost of rounding up and deporting all 12 million guest workers from our country at $215 billion assuming one-quarter of them leave voluntarily. My guess is that most would go deeper underground and work for even less under an involuntary deportation scenario than would leave. So we wind up with an even more underground guest worker program than now, one where on-the-job safety is non-existent, there's no insurance in case of injury and the pay is dreadfully low. Of course, that would play into one of Bush's aims, to have every American work for as little as possible. James Sensenbrenner, one of the most draconian of the Enforcement-only crowd, verifies as much. His proposals would make being here illegally a felony. Talk about driving wages down, if you report your boss for unsafe working conditions and no pay, you go to jail? If you quit, your boss reports you and you go to jail? Didn't we outlaw slavery in 1865? Sensenbrenner and Tancredo would bring it back by criminalizing those we tacitly invited in to pick our fruit and clean our toilets.

So now, hamstrung by a lack of leadership and the wrong party in power, Congress goes on a two week vacation after two weeks of solid work. Not much to show for it. Maybe they'll be more effective on vacation. By the way, they had a week off for St. Patrick's Day. Boy am I looking forward to that Halloween recess. So how much are we paying these guys?