You Knew What He Was When He Clawed His Way Back Into The Senate With Republican Support
So…Joe Lieberman, the Last Honest Man In The Senate, gives a speech at the GOP convention, in which he says, among other things…
When others were silent, John McCain had the judgment to sound the alarm about the mistakes we were making in Iraq. When others wanted to retreat in defeat from the field of battle, when Barack Obama was voting to cut off funding for our troops on the ground,
John McCain had the courage to stand against the tide of public opinion and support the surge, and because of that, today, our troops are at last beginning to come home, not in failure, but in honor!
Honor…is it?
If Obama voted against funding the troops, so did Lieberman
To support the charge, the McCain campaign has cited Obama’s vote of May 24, 2007, against an appropriations bill that included funding for the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and passed, 80-14).
So was that a vote "to cut off funding for our American troops on the battlefield"?
Not primarily.
Obama was fighting at the time for a requirement that President Bush begin to bring the troops home from Iraq. The bill in question did not include such a requirement, and that is why Obama voted against it. Obama said at the time that he wanted to fund the troops, he just didn’t want to fund the particular military strategy that the bill would enable.
“We must fund our troops," Obama said at the time. "But we owe them something more. We owe them a clear, prudent plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war."
Clearly Obama wanted to provide funding for the troops — just not the president’s military strategy.
If, by voting against funding for a strategy he opposed, Obama voted to "cut off funding for the troops," then so did almost every Republican in the Senate — and Lieberman himself — when they voted against a $124-billion appropriations bill on April 26, 2007, that would have funded operations in Iraq and Afghanistan but also required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. (McCain missed the vote on that bill, which passed 51-46 and was subsequently vetoed by Bush.)
What part of honor involves lying through your teeth Joe?
