Why Do I Even Bother

Reading Powerline? Discredit, smear, and obscufiate all criticism of Bush, no matter how credible. I disagree with Murtha's call for US withdrawal from Iraq, but to spin Murtha as being some sort of quasi-peacenik as powerline has... well nothing surprising from those hacks.

Few would deny that Murtha is a "key house Democrat" as the Times states. However, his status as a hawk is debatable. The hawk-dove dichotomy was much-invoked during the war in Vietnam. Hawks supported the war and tended to argue for the use of more force; doves supported leaving Vietnam to the Communists. Since then, the term hawk has been used in other contexts, but with the appropriate modifer, as in "deficit hawk." To be a hawk tout court, it seems to me, Murtha must not only support big defense budgets, but also the use of force overseas to a greater extent than most other politicians do. But the Post provides no evidence that this the case with Murtha, nor does there appear to be any. It's true that he favored going to war in Iraq, but so did John Kerry and countless other Democrats. By May 2004, Murtha had joned with Nancy Pelosi in criticizing the war. He also supported the candidacy of Howard Dean, the party's most prominent dove, for leader of the DNC. The Post story, of course, mentions none of this. Instead, the hard copy story is larded-up at the back-end with "Bush lied" quotes from the likes of Senators Kennedy and Reid.