It's past 3 am here where I live but I had to write a diary entry before I went to bed as I don't think our side truly appreciates the gravity of the situation regarding the START (New Start) treaty. There is a little talk about it, but not enough. We need to be going all in on it too.
The reason is simple: the White House didn't ask for ratification of the treaty to be a battle. They were looking for a few months of hearings and discussions, and then ratification with the same large majority all other nuclear reduction treaties have been given until now. However, it seems that the GOP is interested in trying to stall it, for no reason other than to deny President Obama a legislative victory.
What they want, of course, is to delay the ratification, deny the president a legislative victory, and...
for nobody to notice. Then they can keep the mantle of the party of national security, all while damaging national security in the process. They want this to stay under the radar. And that's because three quarters of the nation wants to see the treaty ratified, NATO allies are in agreement that it needs to be ratified, and so is pretty much the entire military.
In response to this, the White House has decided to go all in.
And because they have decided to go all in, this means one of two things:
- The issue stays under the radar due to us not giving it the attention it deserves, the White House's efforts to do so come to naught, the GOP delays the treaty and gets to pretend that it is the party of national security. Or:
- More and more attention gets paid to the treaty, more articles are written with more and more retired generals and others who agree that any delay is simply the GOP playing with politics, and eventually they will have to back down or face the consequences as they begin to be branded as the party that plays politics when serious national security issues are at stake.
So which will it be? Vice President Biden has been assigned to keep up pressure on the treaty day and night, and President Obama's weekly address today is about the treaty too.
Note that the video includes captions in both English and Spanish, so you can send it to your friends that are hard of hearing or prefer their noticias en español. It's in the public domain so anyone can rehost it, translate it, mix and match it with whatever they want. Write letters to your newspaper, vote up submissions on Reddit, do everything you can to keep the treaty in the public eye. Because the GOP has decided to throw down the gauntlet on this issue for politics alone, and because they have done so they face a huge political defeat in the next month if they are forced to recant their position and agree with the Democrats and the military.
I'll leave you with one quote from this article:
Contrast that with the approach taken by Retired Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson, the former deputy commander of U.S. nuclear forces, who said in an interview yesterday that those who continue to oppose the treaty are showing they have no trust in our military.
Jameson, referring to the wide array of current and former military leaders who support New Start, said it was "quite puzzling" that all this military support is being "ignored."
He added: "I don't know what that says about the trust that people have and the confidence they have in our military."
The GOP trusts its own political barometer over its country's own military, when it comes down to it they put politics well ahead of national security. Are we going to let them keep the issue out of the public eye, and parade around again in a few months as the party of national security, a label they have chosen for themselves and would dearly love the rest of the country to believe?
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