Darcy Burner and nine other Democratic challengers will introduce their “Responsible Plan To End The War In Iraq” today at 2:30PM PT in the nation’s capital. And I sure hope our local media is paying attention, else they find themselves scooped. The Kennebec Journal (Maine) already writes:
“It is not just to separate myself from the pack,” [Chellie Pingree] said. “We candidates are coming in with what we hope will be a very strong mandate for change.”
Pingree said the candidates want to “get elected on a wave of change” and “send a signal to Democratic leaders that there are a lot of candidates who are frustrated that the Congress does not look responsive to the public.”
[…] Burner drafted the manifesto while the candidates contributed thoughts and edited drafts, Pingree said.
When the Republicans announced their “Contract For America” in 1994, it was a top-down affair led by then-Minority Leader Newt Gingrich, in which the NRCC urged their candidates to sign on. But the Responsible Plan is a grassroots effort, initiated by Burner, drafted by her, her fellow challengers and their military advisers, and organized outside the purview (and wishes) of the DCCC. If that’s not political leadership, I don’t know what is.
“I wholeheartedly endorse this plan as a responsible and forward looking plan for ending the war in Iraq. As Burner and her colleagues correctly note, bringing our troops home is the first, but not the only step that must be taken to ensure a debacle like Iraq never happens again,” said Dr. Lawrence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. “This plan addresses the root causes that allowed the Bush Administration to lead this country into this mess, and sets us in the right direction. I applaud their efforts on this ambitious and sound strategy. This is progressive strength on national security in action.”
Darcy Burner has long been a netroots superstar. The rest of the nation is about to discover why.
Fuckin’ awesome. Kudos all around!
Once again…I ask about the Baseline Information used to develop this “Burner Plan”. What information was used and where did it come from? How is Burner able to get Classified Information??
Any worthy Plan has a basis in Intelligence information.
So where did the information come from????
Without a clear presentation of Burner’s fact base, the Plan ain’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Any fool that accepts her feel-good Plan without questioning her is……a fool.
Funny,
I like the emphasis on the former Ronald Reagan administration official..
The extrememists on HA hate Reagan…..Yet somehow, it is neccesary to bring his name into the conversation to lend credibility to the plan?????????
With regard to the plan, we’ll see….
I’d vote for her if I could. We need some leadership.
—
Enjoy the coming depression as America struggles to pay off Bush’s War Debt, brought to you by the corrupt Bush administration, the lock step Republicans and the spineless Democrats. I hope we survive as a country.
2 Cyn
Ask Darcy
http://www.darcyburner.com
2 Cyn
And if you want to know more, watch the event live at darcyburner.com on Monday at 2:30 PM PDT.
Daddy Love–
Will check out her website for sure and try to watch the Press Conference.
I give her credit for thinking about this.
However, the quality of her Plan depends on the quality of the information used to develop the Plan.
“Feelings” don’t count here.
I’m sure Rep. Reichart looks forward to the debates with Darcy.
If the media were doing it’s job, they would question her Fact Basis. I’ll bet no one asks what info she used and where she got it.
I see a “Strategy for Iraq” segment LIVE on CSPAN from 1:15-2:30 PDT. Any word on coverage of Darcy’s piece?
@7: Cynical
Would the “facts” basis be anything like the facts used to go into Iraq?
Such as:
WMDs that did not exist
That Iraq would “pay for itself in oil revenues” – repeated how many times?
That Iraq would be “easy” – said by McCain at least five times
Mission Accomplished
Spreading democracy in the Mideast
or the fact that Fallon (the commander in the Mideast and Petreus’s superior officer) just quit over the surge
or that Petreus says the political progress hasn’t happenend and the surge would not work without political progress.
Maybe the fact that former military officials workerd on this might help.
And all that Dave Reichert has to offer is that he has promised to stop asking for earmarks. Starting next year. Really. Just re-elect him and you’ll see. Riiiiiight.
Buh-bye Dave.
Mr. Cynical,
Why the fuck is classified information needed to extract us from Bush’s Iraq quagmire? The failures were not military, they were political.
Intelligence data? If Bush had at least known the difference between Shiia and Sunni (which is NOT classified information) before the invasion, he might have been concerned about a post-invasion strategy. Instead of expecting to be greeted as liberators, he would have known that the resulting power vacuum would lead to a violent internal power struggle.
The solution is political, not military. Bush’s inability to finish the job is more about a stupid and stubborn man than it is about any tactical or strategic barriers.
7 Cyn
I’m sure Rep. Reichart looks forward to the debates with Darcy.
Oh, come now. She mopped the floor with him in 2006. If he “looks forward” at all to a debate with Darcy Burner, espeically now that she’s setting the election agenda on ground favorable to her, it’s with fear.
11 Darryl
Actually, that failure was strategic. We pulled valuable resources off the hunt to capture those responsible for an attack on our country to invade a country that posed no threat and had nothing to do with those attacks, then violently occupying that nation while doing virtually nothing to rebuild it for five years. It is a strategic blunder that has cost us allies and made enemies where we never had them before, while doing little or nothing to stem the very terrorism we were facing originally.
I agree that it’s not necessarily an intel problem, but I’d say it’s rather one of idiots ideologues running our broader foreign policy.
The Darcy, a would be Iraq war policy architect. I don’t think so….
How about The Darcy starts with the Bellevue city council where she can see to it that pot holes in my neighborhood get patched over and the traffic lights are synchronized.
Daddy Love,
“Actually, that failure was strategic.”
Agreed. But my comment addresses extraction from the Iraq quagmire…not the unrelated issue of failure to arrest and prosecute those responsible for the 11 Sep 2001 attacks.
“I agree that it’s not necessarily an intel problem, but I’d say it’s rather one of idiots ideologues running our broader foreign policy.”
Exactly!
8 Five’ll get you ten it’s a piece dedicated to McCain and Cheney, pontificating on how well the war is going.
Will Princess Darcy take the no earmarks pledge?
You remember Nancy Pelosi and her end earmarks promise don’t you all? Oh yeah… she forgot that soon enough last year.
Itchy Brain @ 14,
“I don’t think so….
Your problem is, you simply don’t think!
Cynical @3,
That’s so open minded of you to criticize the plan before you’ve seen it. The plan is heavily footnoted, references existing proposed legislation, and in many places builds upon the recommendations of the Baker/Hamilton commission.
So they are supposed to wait for intelligence information that they cannot get, that the Bush admin won’t let anyone have, before they do anything? Riiight.
@14
How about The Darcy starts with the Bellevue city council where she can see to it that pot holes in my neighborhood get patched over and the traffic lights are synchronized.
I was gonna suggest that Reichert do this, but I’m not sure he’s capable of it.
The snarkiness of the commentators here is off the charts. NO useful debates to be had here.
re 22: Then go away.
None of the financial mess happened until congress was
taken over by the democrats. They write the checks.
22 FL
Do you mean “commenters?”
@ 25
No, he means “common taters.” It being St. Paddy’s day, he has a fixation on spuds.
24 M
None of the financial mess happened until congress was taken over by the democrats. They write the checks.
Sure, there have been no financial improprieties since Bill Clinton left office right? I mean, we know the Bush’s best friend Kenny Boy Lay (along with some other good Republicans) was involved in some of the scummiest financial meltdowns and market manipulation since Standard Oil.
But no, after January 2001 no one in real estate did anything wrong or in any way skirted of broke the law or manipulated markets until January 2007, when a Democratic Congress somehow “wrote checks” (that is, passed a budget in mid-2007 that will begin affecting disbursements in 2008) to and/or from Bear Sterns, Countrywide Mortgage, and the Carlyle Group (they just defaulted on $16 billion in debt), right?
And we all know that the Democrats in Congress also killed 4000 American servicemen in Iraq, raised oil prices to $110/bbl, and defrauded the National Republican Congressional Committee.
So if Democrats were out to do all this cruddy stuff with their mighty legislative power, why didn’t the noble, ethical, squeaky-clean Republicans in the Senate stop them with a filibuster?
Sorry, I got a little off-topic. Hey, it’s almost 2:30! Meet me at http://www.darcyburner.com
mark,
“None of the financial mess happened until congress was
taken over by the democrats. They write the checks.”
Bullshit. The financial mess was “orchestrated” well before Jan 2005…starting with the absence of any post-invasion plan (except for making pretty floral arangements from the flowers thrown at the feet of the liberators).
That congress “writes the checks” is irrelevant. The administration spends (or otherwise deals with) the money. They’ve lost billions in Iraq. And have used the money to hire very expensive outside contractors because the military is overstretched. Most importantly, they have utterly failed to establish peace and security in Iraq, resulting in a prolonged occupation that goes beyond Rumsfeld’s high-ball estimate of 6 months.
(On Feb 7, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”)
Darryl
Actually, if you want to look at more direct causal factors, there’s a bit of deregulation of the banking industry and a failure to take a look at what was happening with derivative financial instruments. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised that there’s a bit of regulatory oversight that should have happened but didn’t.
Having said that, the parallels with Vietnam continue. There, too, we tried to wage a war while still trying to maintain some form of domestic economic stimulus. Over the long run, that combination has never been good for an economy.
In that vein, it’s worth pointing out that both the authorization for the use of force, and more importantly, the cooking of intelligence reports in order to receive that authorization, happened when Republicans held the watch.
There is no “plan” to speak of.
The plan was NOT written by Darcy. It is the product of a PR firm!
“…[Wired for Change] work[s] with our clients to capitalize on timely political opportunities and quickly build and launch websites and online campaigns. A key to our success is that we identify clever, niche actions for our clients that fit within broader narratives”
They simply took the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report, restated the info with their own spin, added some military bigwig names and… instant foreign policy cred for young, inexperienced candidates!
Note what is actually said: Darcy endorses the plan. It isn’t her plan. She just says she agrees with it.
And, finally, someone should tell former part-time high school econ teacher Marc Laitin, the registered site owner, that an ENDORSEE (on the website’s top nav bar) is one who RECEIVES an endorsement. Unless the “plan” is endorsing the candidates, it should be a List of ENDORSERS. Or, more properly, List of Wired for Change Clients.
Between stunts like this and national “minister eruptions,” the GOP will simply win by default.
Dear Daddy Love,
It turned out to be a strategic blunder because of conservative ideology. The idea to invade Iraq had nothing to do with killing the religious conservatives that attacked us, but everything to do with advancing the conservative agenda of destroying representative, Liberal democracy. A “war president” can get anything he wants, including eliminating the checks and balances inherent to representative, Liberal democracy.
John