It isn't hard to figure out why he keeps winning

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — The House on Thursday upheld President Bush’s veto of a bill to provide health insurance to 10 million children, but Democrats vowed to send it back to him next month, with minor changes, in the belief that they could ultimately prevail.

Despite a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign and intense lobbying by children’s advocates, supporters of the bill were unable to convert a single House Republican who voted against the bill last month.

For now, the insurance vote stands as the latest example of how Mr. Bush can still get his way on Capitol Hill. Through artful use of veto threats and his veto pen, Mr. Bush has fended off attempts to force a change of course in Iraq — a feat Democrats would never have imagined when they pushed Republicans out of power a year ago. He has twisted Democrats into knots over domestic surveillance, and forced them to rethink a resolution condemning as genocide a century-old massacre of Armenians.

And don't you know that they're gnashing their teeth over it. But look at each defeat the Democrats have suffered. The children's socialized heath care bill would have bloated a program which was designed to help the truly poor by expanding it to cover kids whose parents have a household income of over $80,000 in some cases. The GAO already reports that for every two children who enter the program one of them is already covered by private insurance, which their parents will drop so that the taxpayers can foot the bill. This is nothing more than an attempt to entrap the middle class in the soul-destroying prison of government handouts and make them slaves to the welfare state.

The "change of direction" in Iraq that the Democrats wanted to force on the administration was nothing less than abject surrender and humiliating retreat from the region. The goal was to hang defeat around George W Bush's neck as revenge for Florida 2000 and the genocide that would have occurred in Iraq, the chaos the region would have been thrown into, the terrorism which would have followed the retreating US military back to America's shores, the fact that America would have once and for all time proven that it could not be trusted as an ally - and the worldwide realignment of alliances that would have triggered, all were acceptable collateral damage as far as the Democrats were concerned.

Honestly answer this question. Is there a word that describes people willing to inflict so much harm on so many people in the pursuit of a trivial political fantasy better than "monster"? If there is I'd like to know what it is.

As for the "domestic surveillance" business this used to really puzzle me. After all the only people inside the US who get their phones bugged are those who are found to be in communication with known terrorists. We capture some al Qaeda leader in Iraq or Afghanistan and his laptop or PDA contains some American phone numbers. Because the knowledge that we have this guy cannot be kept secret for long, a few days at most, every one of his contact numbers will become useless very soon. So hours can be of critical importance. The time that it would take to jump through all the hoops and get a warrant could be the time it takes for that American al Qaeda member or sympathiser to make good an escape.

The Democrats know this and while they may be willing to see genocide in Iraq and even have Israel get nuked off the surface of the earth in order to "get" Bush I couldn't believe that they would risk their own personal safety to do so. After all most of the hard-left Democrats that are complaining the loudest are from large cities like New York and San Francisco which they have to know are very attractive targets for terrorists. And as House members and Senators they spend most of their time in Washington DC, which is also a major terrorist target. Everything the government does to catch terrorists makes them safer. In fact they benefit more from such anti-terrorist measures than people in small towns (people like me).

So what gives, I wondered. They can't be stupid enough to think that the president wants to abuse these powers to spy on them personally, can they? Then I saw this story from The Hill about how Hillary Clinton used illegal wiretaps on her political enemies and it all became clear.

The Democrats are judging the president not by what kind of man he is but by what kind of people they are. They fear that Mr. Bush will abuse any new powers he is granted because they know that in his place they would.

But back to my main point, which is this. All of the things which George W Bush has prevented the Democrats from doing would have been very bad for the country. The fact that none of these measures passed or that none of the president's vetoes were overridden indicates that there just isn't enough support for them among the population. After all if HillaryCare for Kids was what the people really wanted the congressional Republicans would have been hit with the same kind of outpouring they got during the amnesty fight. But nothing like that materialized - not even close.

Same thing about getting out of Iraq. Yes people are tired of the war and yes they want the troops to come home, but after VICTORY not defeat. Americans want to end the war by winning it, not by losing it. Were this not the case we would have already surrendered because the public would have demanded it.

The lesson is that average Americans, even those misguided enough to vote for Democrats, are patriotic. They love their country and do not wish to see it suffer defeat. They value their freedom, but do not believe that the Constitution is a suicide pact so they will not tolerate the handcuffing of their military, intelligence or law enforcement agencies in a time of war.

George W Bush knows all of this. Apparently Nancy Pelosi and her crowd don't.