'Cut and run' remark undercuts Roskam

'Cut and run' remark undercuts Roskam
BY RICH MILLER
September 29, 2006
Copyright by The chicago Sun Times



Ronald Reagan was right. Washington, D.C., is the problem.

Where else but in D.C. could well-educated, intelligent people argue ferociously for a solid year about whether or not to call the horrific bloodbath in Iraq a "civil war," while never once bothering to come together on any actual solutions to the problem?

In what other civilized democracy would otherwise reasonable human beings constantly question whether their political opponents are on the side of terrorists? And instead of unifying behind solutions to the real terrorist threat and its underlying causes, they ban little old ladies from bringing bottled water onto airplanes?

And on what bizarre planet does an official National Intelligence Estimate, which reports that the Iraq war is a major reason for the spread of jihadist movements, become yet another indecent political football, with both sides parsing every word to prove that they're right and everyone who disagrees with them is somehow evil?

What in the hell is wrong with that place?

Since the ruling party doesn't have a new plan for what to do about a terribly unpopular war, the Republicans have retreated into empty sloganeering. So, we get lines like "We need to finish well," which replaced "stay the course" as a widely used slogan several months ago because even though that's exactly what we're doing in Iraq, the party in power doesn't want to admit it. The strange birds that inhabit our nation's capital are far more interested in devising ingenious new ways of fighting semantics wars than figuring out practical solutions to real ones.

Some Democrats would impose a timetable for troop withdrawal, but since wars never operate on strict timetables, their promises look suspiciously hollow. Also, the Democrats who want withdrawal don't want to talk about the bloody aftermath such a move could cause. "You break it, you buy it," warned Colin Powell, but some Democrats would just like to return the damaged goods to the store for a full refund.

Still, at least someone is proposing something other than more of the same. The Republicans, in "response," have not come up with any new alternatives, but they have accused the entire Democratic Party of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq. This schoolyard taunt has spawned a whole new linguistics debate in D.C. and even right here in Illinois.

Tammy Duckworth is a genuine war hero who lost both her legs when she was shot while piloting a helicopter over Iraq. She's now a Democratic nominee for Congress in Illinois' 6th District, and her campaign staff has been waiting patiently for her Republican opponent to question her patriotism so that they could pounce like tigers.

It happened right on cue this week, when Republican state Sen. Peter Roskam mentioned the dreadful "cut and run" line during a radio debate with Duckworth.

As Scott Fornek reported in the Sun-Times, Roskam didn't specifically say that Duckworth wanted to cut and run. But by then, other news outlets and pundits were claiming he did. Duckworth, the commentators all pointed out, can't "run" because her legs were "cut" off in "Iraq."

Roskam took plenty of heat for the remark, and his campaign quickly claimed that he didn't mean to imply that Duckworth was a cut and runner. At a subsequent meeting with a newspaper editorial board, Roskam said that he did not believe Duckworth subscribed to the Democratic Party's cut and run philosophy.

I have little pity for Roskam, even though he was almost universally misquoted. Injecting that D.C. rhetoric into the debate was the clearest indication yet that he sympathizes with those farcical D.C. semioticians instead of the practical, sane Midwesterners in the district he seeks to represent.

Maybe he'll learn a lesson from this. Midwesterners generally prize solutions born in the spirit of compromise, not inaction caked in empty, divisive sloganeering.

Rich Miller greatly prefers covering state politics.