"Coward-in-Chief"

Here's a good overview of the hypocrisy of Murtha's critics.

From an editorial in The Progressive Populist:
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After Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine veteran of Korea and Vietnam and a renowned advocate of military veterans, came out in favor of an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, Republicans hit the roof. House GOP leaders replaced his thoughtful resolution with a one-sentence call for an immediate withdrawal. It was designed to split Democrats, so the GOP sent it to the floor for a vote.

Democrats refused to take the bait, as all but three Dems rejected the GOP resolution, but not before first-year Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, had a few minutes of infamy during the House debate over the resolution, when she scolded Murtha that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do." Schmidt previously had belittled the sacrifice of Paul Hackett, the Marine veteran of Iraq and a Democrat who ran against her in the August special election that narrowly sent her to Congress from the suburban Cincinnati district.

Murtha did not back down, even after Vice President Dick Cheney questioned the congressman's judgment. "I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," replied Murtha, who won a Bronze Star for action in Vietnam.

Of course a Bronze Star won't deflect a Republican smear job, as the GOP Swift Boat hacks showed last year when they slandered John Kerry's bemedalled Vietnam record in favor of No-Show George. Republicans already have filed a complaint with the Ethics Committee about Murtha's relationship with his lobbyist brother.

Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted that in the early 1980s, when a team of FBI agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik offered Congress members $50,000 in return for helping the sheik gain residency in the US, Murtha was taped telling the agents, "Not interested," but inviting the sheik to invest a few million dollars in his struggling hometown of Jonestown, Pa., where unemployment reached 25%. "Now, having learned through Abscam that good intentions cannot be achieved by appealing to false premises, Mr. Murtha is applying the same fresh truth to the Iraq war," Roddy wrote.

"No man has more credibility on issues military and certainly none represents a district more attuned to the values Mr. Bush professes to love," Roddy added. "If Jack Murtha's district stands behind him on this, the Bush administration has lost that part of the body politic wherein the heart is kept."

The cowards are not the Congress members who are having second thoughts about trusting the president when he said Saddam Hussein presented a threat to the US. The cowards are those in power who "fixed" intelligence to support the case for a war that they thought would benefit the oil companies and help them regain control of the Senate.

Those cowards won't admit they made a mistake when they withdrew US military resources from Afghanistan, which actually supported the 9/11 attacks on the US, to proceed with an invasion of Iraq, against the advice of US allies in the region who warned that US intervention of Iraq would simply recruit more anti-Western Islamic fanatics.

Those cowards won't admit they erred when they fired Gen. Eric Shinseki for saying they would need several hundred thousand troops to occupy Iraq. Or when they fired White House economist Larry Lindsey for telling a journalist the war would cost upwards of $200 billion. They won't admit it was a mistake to go ahead with the invasion before they had enough armored vests or armored cars to protect US soldiers. But soldiers pay for those mistakes. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, was promoted to head the World Bank. And CIA Director George Tenet, who assured Secretary of State Colin Powell that the allegations had been checked out and Saddam was on the verge of developing weapons of mass destruction, received the Medal of Freedom.
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