Oh Boy, Obey! Better Talk to These Senators, or the Vietnamese

Congressman David Obey, who voted in 2002 against authorizing U.S. armed action against Saddam, today commented on the House resolution to withdraw from Iraq:

“Please don’t characterize what we are doing as shutting down funding for the troops,” said Representative David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat. “Some of you have the misimpression that’s what the Congress did in Vietnam, and you don’t want to see the repeat of that. Congress never did that in Vietnam.”

Obey is technically correct. Congress did not send South Vietnam down the tubes by not supplying U.S. forces there. Congress, instead, forbid U.S. forces to engage in armed intervention after 1973 to uphold its pledges that would have prevented the massive Soviet and Chinese supplied North Vietnamese invasion of 1975 and did starve the South Vietnamese of the arms and supplies to adequately defend themselves.

Obey is also technically correct that the House is not intending to cut off funding for the U.S. troops, at least yet. Obey may, however, want to talk to 14 (15 if Independent Socialist Sanders of Vermont is included) of his Democrat cohorts in the Senate who today voted against the Gregg amendment "expressing the sense of Congress that no funds should be cut off or reduced for American Troops in the field which would result in undermining their safety or their ability to complete their assigned mission.” They are:
Daniel Akaka, Joseph Biden, Jeff Bingaman, Robert Byrd, Christopher Dodd, Russell Feingold, Edward Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menéndez, Patty Murray, Jack Reed, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, Sheldon Whitehouse, Bernard Sanders

As Obey told an advocate of more quickly cutting off funding for the U.S. in Iraq:

In a video posted on the Internet site YouTube, the Democratic lawmaker is seen pounding his fist repeatedly into the air, complaining loudly that Democrats don't have enough votes to cut off war funding and the protesters don't understand the debate in Congress.
"That makes no sense. It doesn't work that way," Obey says at one point.

Indeed, the Democrats’ march to cut the legs out from under South Vietnam went through a series of attempts from 1970 onward. Obey’s march to undermine the U.S. and Iraq continues onward. That’s how the Democrats work, relentlessly, to destroy U.S. resolve, policy, and allies.