This Is the Way the World Ends

T. S. Eliot wrote The Hollow Men more than 80 years ago, but if there has ever been a better description of today's Democratic leaders in Congress, I don't know what it is.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Today the Senate joined the House in voting for America's defeat in the war in Iraq by requiring our troops to leave the field of battle by a date certain, regardless of the then current conditions on the ground. Their dried voices whispered words of retreat and cowardice, drowning out those who still love our country enough to want to see us win. Unfortunately their words, though wrong-headed and near-treasonous, are not meaningless. They carry a dire weight for our future. It's almost incomprehensible that nearly an entire political party is willing, even eager, to see our country lose just for partisan advantage, but that's where we are.

Harry Reid (D-NV), Teddy Kennedy (D-Vodka), Credit Check Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and of course John Kerry (D-MA, and did you know that he served in Vietnam?) joined together to lead their party over the cliff to try to make sure America loses a battle they never wanted us to fight in the first place. The logic of their statements that they desire to see the war end (not that I believe for a second that's what their true intention is) is utterly false. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. We can run away from Iraq, but that won't end the war. If the enemy is not defeated, the war will continue.

Eliot's poem ends with this refrain, also exceedingly apt to the topic at hand:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.