Yes, that part I agree with. We don’t need a draft to counteract a president who is overeager to go to war, we need a Congress that isn’t afraid of doing its frickin’ job.
BG: Yes, the bet is whether we invade Iran, and I’m taking the “no” side. Timeframe would be during Bush’s presidency. No one else would even be stupid enough to think about it.
Yep. I was born and raised there; I know exactly of which I speak. I also speak the same way about smug, tasteless, racist-in-denial Yankees and utterly self-absorbed West-coast crystal fondlers. I’m all about equal opportunity… 
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There’s good folks and bad folks, stereotypical and non-stereotypical folks everywhere.
Luckily, I’m just an idiot on a message board and not in a position of political leadership. I’m just hoping the next Democratic congressperson who takes their mouth off the tailpipe long enough to say something publicly doesn’t screw it up.
The Rangel gambit, while I can see his point, is not what anybody needs to hear right now. Somebody has to bring more discipline to the party, as in “The next person who flaps his jaws about raising taxes, gun control, banning the Pledge of Alliegance, Abortion or whatever, is going to get their throats ripped out and their district won’t get so much as a pothole fixed until they’re out of office”. There’s not going to be a honeymoon period.
How will a draft help us invade Iran, exactly? The last thing our military needs is a bunch of untrained cannon fodder. We need trained soldiers who know what they’re doing, not half-trained conscipts. In order to have trained draftee soldiers for an Iran invasion you’d need to start the draft a couple of years ahead of time, and you’d need to dramatically increase the military budget to pay for the increased manpower.
A bunch of draftees that need to be trained, housed, fed, armed, paid, and provided medical care will degrade the readiness of our military, not enhance it. If we were positioning ourselves to invade Iran a bunch of draftees would make the invasion harder, not easier. Of course, from Rangell’s POV, that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. But the Pentagon certainly wouldn’t want a bunch of draftees.
You know, sometimes, a sure-to-fail bill is brought up just for political leverage. One example was the GOP’s bill to immediately withdraw all troops from Iraq. John Murtha had proposed a phased withdrawl that wouldn’t even start for a year or two. The GOP quickly erected their immediate withdrawl facade to make Murtha and other peacemakers look foolish. Maybe Rangel is hoping for a payoff where he can say, “You see? Even the Republicans don’t support this crazy war.”
Yes, sometimest that happens, but this wouldn’t be one of those times. Almost no one suports a draft, and most voters don’t want their Congresscritters voting to reinstate it. It just makes Rangle look like an idiot, because people don’t equate support for the war with wanting a draft. He does need be told to STFU.
Better to have a vote like they tried to do last time, which called for either a timetable for withdrawl or for a date to begin drawing down troops. Not only is that what the Dems actually want, but that’s what most Americans want, too. Then let those Pubbies be on record for wanting to “stay the course”.
Yeah – as An Arky put it, the leadership needs to knock some heads together and explain that the next guy who flaps his gums about something this obviously stupid has just volunteered his district as the test case for the new PorkBuster-O-Matic budget cutting mechanism.
It won’t, much. It’s a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition. We couldn’t possibly hope to succeed with the troop strength we’ve got now, and we can’t expect volunteers to make up the numbers.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Yes, that part I agree with. We don’t need a draft to counteract a president who is overeager to go to war, we need a Congress that isn’t afraid of doing its frickin’ job.[\QUOTE]
It would help if we had an American public so stupid and ill-informed that they bought the notion that Iraq had something to do with 911, and were thus slavering to go to war with them, thus making Congress afraid to do its job. I’m not saying you were pushing this line, John, but the Administration sure was, and there were plenty of people calling ‘bullshit’ on it, but no one got heard.
Yes, that would help, too. I just think it’s slightly more realistic to expect Congresscriters to do their frackin’ jobs than to expect the electorate to become more intelligent overnight. Hopefully, both sets of people learned something from that little experiment of Bush’s in Iraq…
And so this is proof that we’re going to reinstate the draft…how? You say we can’t invade Iran without reinstating the draft, then I point out that reinstating the draft isn’t going to help at all. So if current volunteer numbers won’t let us invade Iran, and adding draftees into the mix won’t let us invade Iran either, then the draft is irrelevant, because an invasion of Iraq is impossible either way.
Face facts. A draft is politically impossible. Bush can’t just wave a fucking magic wand and poof we’ve got a draft. A draft is politically impossible, it won’t happen. And so all this talk is moot. And therefore any political action that has a draft as a neccesary condition is just moonshine, because we’re not going to have a draft.
You seem to be arguing that since some people want to invade Iran, and we’d need a draft to invade Iran, that means a draft is likely. But that’s ridiculous.
There’s some sort of wishful thinking going on here, in the nature of the “What if Bush was a gay alien superhero wrestler?” threads we’ve been having. Gosh, if only Bush would do something like reinstate the draft–then, since everyone agrees that the draft would be unpopular–it would convince everyone that Bush is a bad guy, the kind of guy who does bad things like reinstating the draft and getting my teenage son killed! And the war would end! Attica! Attica! There’s the fantasy that if only things got worse then everyone would agree about how bad things are and then everyone would be sorry they were so mean to me.
It’s fucking pathetic. I mean, Bush has done plenty of things to annoy the electorate, and he’s not exactly popular RIGHT NOW. Why do you all have to invent pretend bad things that he MIGHT do in the future (but won’t)?
And they are such a special type of stupid, aren’t they?
The fringe that actually wants a draft does so for political/ideological reasons, not practical ones:
Advocates for a draft believe that it would amplify anti-war sentiment. Some even believe that it would create sufficient public resistance to prevent wars (though they don’t seem able to cite an example of a tense situation that stopped short of war because of public disinclination to send their drafted friends and relatives).
Advocates for a draft believe that forcing people into government service would be good in and of itself for some reason (to promote some idea of “national cohesion”, to level perceived class bias in the all-volunteer force by forcing more equal represenation across socioeconomic lines, to homogenize the military subculture with the overall national culture).
I find both arguments to be rather less than compelling, to say the least.
At this point a draft is going to be seen by Republicans as just another attempt to use the armed forces for “Clinton-era social engineering” –just as it’s going to be seen by mainstream Democrats as a throwback to a more repressive and imperialistic era. No one wants this. Probably even Charlie Rangel doesn’t really want it –he’s more likely just trying to throw a different light on the war and the possibility of future wars.
Dou: We know that Rangle doesn’t really want it-- he’s on record saying he’d vote against his own legislation on the subject if it ever came to the floor. He’s like comedian who keeps telling the same joke thinking that people will eventually laugh. Get some new material, Chuck! Your draft shtick just generates :rolleyes: .
Given how the Democrats play in Peoria, I’d venture to say that the silence will be deafening.
Even some of the Democrats have stated that they won because people were sick of the Republicans and wanted a change. That doesn’t mean that the protest vote is one of approval. They have a mighty fine line to toe until they can convince people that they’re right. This is not a good first step. Hopefully it’s not followed by a series of gaffes, missteps, and humiliating nonsense.
All in all, they seem to have “played” pretty well of late. You might have heard. Though maybe not specificly in Peoria…
You can read the rest of what I said at your leisure.
You know, I wrote up a post where I said almost the exact same thing, then deleted it. Scary.
Of course, it’s also scary that a man who thinks this is clever is about to be the chairman of a very important House committee, and that every time he makes this proposal, the news media treat it as if it’s purely serious.
He did the same thing a few years ago (sponsored a bill to bring back the draft), then had to VOTE AGAINST his own bill!
Somehow, I don’t thinlkol’charley has a firm grip on reality…or maybe, he’s trying out for “who can be the dumbest congressman of the year”? :smack:
Hmmmm. Senators don’t count, right? So Ted “Tube Truck” Stevens doesn’t count? Katherine Harris is gone. Foley’s gone. Yeah, a whole bunch of the really brain dead dumfuks have vanished lately.
Look, Charlie’s making a point. I’m not that crazy about the way he’s doing it, but no real harm is being done, so whats the BHAD? You don’t like his point, and I take it, don’t much like him, but that doesn’t make him stupid. Not compared to some of the other brain wipes that abound.