Another Rangel Trial Balloon
By Miguel Guanipa (11/23/06)
One has to wonder at the perfunctory informality with which Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y. announces to a country so fiercely divided over what a majority allegedly feels is an illegitimate war, that a draft will have to be instituted in order to fight this war to which they are so strongly opposed; so much for those who cast their votes for the party which promised a new direction.
If memory serves me right, the threat that Republicans would reinstate the draft was one of the Democrat’s rallying cries to attract many a disaffected youth to the voting booth during the 2004 election. Even P-Diddy (if that is his most recent name) capitalized in this venture by printing the rather portentous “Vote or Die” T-shirts which were a big seller amongst the enlightened youth ripe for conversion to the party of change.
The revisionist argument behind Representative Charles Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is that his proposal for a draft would deter politicians from launching war; in other words, people in leadership positions would think twice about engaging in war if they have a personal vested interest in preventing it. This reasoning dictates that one does not respond aggressively to hostilities initiated by a foreign power if the lives of our own defense forces are at stake, the dreaded part and parcel philosophy of appeasement of the Democratic Party, which often poses as diplomacy.
A variation on a similar bill was proposed by Charles Rangel and 5 other Democrat congressmen in 2003 and was soundly defeated by a vote of 402-2. The only difference is that back then the proposal was deemed ridiculously conceived and insulting to members of congress. Today the future speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi cautiously framed it as a way for Rangel who is "a strong voice for social justice in our country" to “make a point." It’s hard to tell if that is a ringing endorsement or a charge of mutiny.
Rangel’s notion that he “(doesn’t) see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft," implies that there are only two kinds of people who would defend their country: those who, because of their lack of opportunities to succeed in the real world, enlist out of economic necessity masquerading as volunteerism - as Senator John Kerry implied recently -or those who are forced to enlist by law. There is no room for the men and women today that did not feel the need to be coerced into defending their country and are presently conducting themselves valiantly in the theater of war. No doubt they have to endure the scorn of those in the Democratic Party once again, only weeks before they get the credentials to do it with relative impunity.
Senator McCain’s reasons for reluctantly supporting a potential draft measure are slightly different than the “senators with kids in the army won’t start a war” rationale behind Mr. Rangel’s proposal. Mr. McCain appeals to a more sobering reality in which he acknowledges something that up until the congressional election most Democrats chose to sweep under the rug and that is that if we were to “cut and run” the terrorists will no doubt come after us. In McCain’s own words: "You read Zarqawi, and you read bin Laden. ... It's not just Iraq that they're interested in. It's the region, and then us."
But the short term clinical amnesia that often afflicts the majority of Americans could serve the Democrat’s purposes in this endeavor just as it did before the election when Democrats claimed that the War in Iraq was a mere diversion from the real war on terror. Now they can claim that their hands are tied and they are forced to make what is clearly a very unpopular decision based on the fact that they have been thrust into a conundrum posed by a very unpopular war over which they have had little say in spite of the fact that they voted for it.
Some frightened college coeds may find rest in the temporary assurance offered by the fact that Rangel’s capricious proposals typically have very slim chances of being seriously considered by a majority of his more dispassionate peers; but the fact that he feels emboldened enough to make such a daring overture at least raises the question of whether this new empowerment that democrats have acquired will be the kind that functions on the basis of what polls reveal after the sporadic release of all sorts of trial balloons or one that operates on the discipline of responsible governance as they originally pledged.
Maybe in the next elections all those students that once constituted the laziest voting block in the country will finally listen to P-Diddy and get out the vote; whether they will vote for his party of choice is up for debate.
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