More Monday Mikey Madness

I’ll get to our 8th district U.S. House rep again in a minute.

An editorial in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune made me realize that I had to revisit Bushco’s efforts to grant itself immunity from prosecution as war criminals, which is in fact what they are. And by the way (speaking of the war), do you know that, according to this AP story, “nearly 12,000 U.S. and Iraqi soldiers” are being sent into Baghdad to “curb the surge” of sectarian violence?

Gee, if I were the AP editor, I would have made THAT the headline instead of the yawner “Bush Tackles Foreign Policy His First Day Back” (Dubya is more likely to “get tackled” by it, though, as per usual). I also would have tried my best to obtain exact numbers as to which troops are U.S. and which are Iraqi. However, I’m just another unkempt, nasty, not-sufficiently-subservient liberal blogger, so what do I know?

And it wouldn’t be possible these days to talk about the war without talking about Mikey Fitz, as this letter writer did in today’s Bucks County Courier Times:

Once again, Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick has displayed a stunning lack of backbone in his recent decision to waffle on his support of George W. Bush’s war. Since before even being elected to Congress, Fitzpatrick’s toed (sic) the Republican Party line on the war, kowtowed to his Washington, D.C.-based masters and supported this war that has needlessly claimed thousands of American lives.

Now the Congressman wants us to believe that he thinks the President has made crucial mistakes and that a new strategy is needed? Where was Fitzpatrick while these mistakes were being made? He was dutifully hailing the president as bold and principled and turning a blind eye to the growing disaster which is his and Bush’s war.

Fitzpatrick has exposed his main weakness for the voters of Bucks County to see. He is not a leader; he lacks conviction and he is stereotypical of what is wrong in politics. Now that a majority of the American people have found the nerve to speak out against his war, our congressman has decided that it is in his political favor to take a new stance. Amazingly, Fitzpatrick still has no new ideas on how to end American embroilment in Iraq; he pays lip service to the voters while remaining content to watch American lives thrown away, like so much garbage.

Patrick Murphy has a plan for Iraq, a solution which he has posted on his web site for all to read. Murphy, an Iraq War veteran, is an authority on what has gone wrong in Iraq, and the most qualified candidate to offer plans to get our country out of this mess – starting by demanding honesty from President Bush, bringing home our National Guard and Reserves, layout out a clear exit strategy for the remaining forces and then do what the Iraqi people have asked – allow them to follow their own destiny.

Patrick Murphy has shown himself to be a bold and courageous leader in this campaign, while our current representative can do nothing but follow George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and the rest of their gang.

The time has come to remove the Republicans from power in Congress, especially those like Fitzpatrick who have made a career of simply following the instructions of the party bosses. We in Bucks County have an important but very easy choice to make in November: choose the leader; choose Patrick Murphy.

Joseph Mueller
Bristol Township

Amen, brother.

Oh, and by the way, did you hear about how Mike Conallen, a representative of the Fitzpatrick campaign, tried to derail Saturday’s conference call about terrorism and Iraq between Patrick Murphy and Sen. John Kerry, attended by the press, on Saturday 8/12? Fact-esque has all of the excruciating details here (so professional, Mikey...).