Freshmen Senator Ted Cruz may be the (inexplicable) toast of House Republicans, but his colleagues in the Senate
are getting increasingly fed up with him.
At a closed-door lunch meeting in the Senate’s Mansfield Room, Republican after Republican pressed Cruz to explain how he would propose to end the bitter budget impasse with Democrats, according to senators who attended the meeting. A defensive Cruz had no clear plan to force an end to the shutdown — or explain how he would defund Obamacare, as he has demanded all along, sources said. […]
“It was very evident to everyone in the room that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy – he never had a strategy, and could never answer a question about what the end-game was,” said one senator who attended the meeting. “I just wish the 35 House members that have bought the snake oil that was sold could witness what was witnessed today at lunch.” […]
“He kept trying to change the subject because he never could answer the question,” the senator said. “It’s pretty evident it’s never been about a strategy – it’s been about him. That’s unfortunate. I think he’s done our country a major disservice. I think he’s done Republicans a major disservice.”
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Big shocker: no WMDs in Iraq:
Hold on to your seats:
The U.S-led team hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has not found any stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons, but will keep searching the country, CIA adviser David Kay said on Thursday.
Kay, heading the search for chemical and biological weapons as well as evidence of any effort to develop nuclear weapons, presented a classified interim report to U.S. lawmakers behind closed doors [...]
But multiple sources have told the team that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW (chemical warfare) program after 1991," Kay said. And information found so far suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop and produce and fill new chemical warfare weapons was "reduced -- if not entirely destroyed."
Kay concluded that "whatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information.""Serious constraints of time"?
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The only time limit was self-imposed by a petulant Bush eager to get his war on. And those "intelligence judgments" were not made by professionals -- the CIA or DIA, but by political hacks out of the Pentagon. |
Tweet of the Day:
Day 1 Recap: 4.7mm visitors to
www.healthcare.gov. 190k calls. Uninsured Americans are enrolling. Millions want to #GetCovered
— @Katie44
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, it's Day Two of the Republican Shutdown.
Greg Dworkin rounds up Dana Perino's nativist nonsense, the Gop leadership collapse, shutdown polling, ACA sign-ups & more.
Joan McCarter joined us for discussion of procedural developments & the scramble to come up with mini-bills to re-open bits & pieces of the government that make good press copy. In-depth explanations of suspension of the rules, motions to recommit & discharge petitions. Woohoo! Also: gerrymandering, the importance of state and local elections and party-building, and how even a "clean" CR enshrines sequestration. Lastly, Charles Pierce's "The Reign of Morons Is Here."
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