The War Machine and the Politics of Hypocrisy

In the mainstream liberal blogosphere, discussion of the recent Iraq war supplemental focused to a great extent on the hypocrisy of House Republicans, who opposed the bill because it also contains a $5 billion line of credit for the IMF. Matthew Yglesias writes:

We can all recall the days when voting against an emergency war supplemental bill was the most evil and un-American thing ever . . . Beyond the pure hypocrisy play, it’s worth observing that this is a really bad reason to vote against the bill.

Many progressives would undoubtedly disagree with Yglesias, and, ironically, find themselves in the company of the House GOP. Chris Bowers, for instance, finds the arguments for funding the IMF with no strings attached 'deeply unserious':

It is infuriating how many Washington policy analysts will, when their arguments have no real persuasive value and are overtly contradictory, simply resort to calling opponents of their policy "not serious." This is especially the case when three-dozen progressive members of the House of Representatives are holding up IMF funding until four specific reforms are instituted by the IMF.

On the other hand, among liberals, there seems to be relatively little discussion of the hypocrisy of 'anti-war' Democrats continuing to fund the wars they once claimed to oppose. One wonders just how long it will be before progressives realize that their interests are not served by the Democratic Party. Some have already drawn the obvious conclusion. Jeremy Scahill writes at Alternet:

In a vote that should go down in recent histories as a day of shame for the Democrats, on Tuesday the House voted to approve another $106 billion dollars for the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan). To put a fine point on the interconnection of the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of free market neoliberal economics, the bill included a massive initiative to give the International Monetary Fund billions more in U.S. taxpayer funds.

The Democrats, of course, were more than willing to co-opt the message and momentum of the anti-war movement when it was a matter of winning elections, but now that those elections have been won, there is little reason for them to continue pandering to that portion of their constituency. This is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the case of Cindy Sheehan. Once the darling of anti-war Democrats for standing up to Bush outside his ranch in Crawford (which Democrats continually proved incapable of doing in Washington D.C.), she has since become a political pariah and gadfly. To her credit, she has turned her sights on the Democratic Party itself:

I am not even remotely surprised that the new supplemental bill for war funding passed the House today . . . I left the Democratic Party over two years ago upset over the passage of another war funding bill . . . Are you tired of being used and betrayed by Democrats, yet?

Let's hope that conservatives prove less gullible than their liberal counterparts, and finally divorce themselves from the GOP.