Congress:

Beholden

and afraid
Calling Sen. Olympia Snowe a Franco-Republican is supposed to be derogatory?

Not in Franco-rich Maine.

The Club for Growth, which works to elect conservative Republicans to Congress, is so miffed that Snowe and two other members of Congress didn’t back the president’s $726 billion tax cut proposal that it launched a television campaign Friday comparing Snowe, Ohio’s Sen. George Voinovich and New York’s Rep. Amo Houghton to France – as in France’s unwillingness to support the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It’s a puzzling comparison.

It’s true that France didn’t support the war, favoring continued arms inspection teams instead because it didn’t think there was justification for military action. The country also has significant financial ties to the Saddam regime, which it probably didn’t want to see cut. So, France’s resistance in engaging Iraq was partly moral and partly self-serving.

It’s true that Sen. Snowe didn’t support the size of President Bush’s tax cut package, unconvinced that any short-term gain we may realize was worth the potential growth in debt. There’s nothing self-serving about that. It was a stand taken wholly to protect constituents.

The same could be said of Vionovich and Houghton and they should take pride in that. But the Club for Growth has labeled these three as Franco-Republicans, creating what it considers a new slur.

The organization that started the name calling is worth a look.

The Club for Growth has about 9,000 members and raises millions of dollars to elect conservative Republicans who share its vision for smaller government and lower taxes of the Reagan administration.

It is also an organization that proudly proclaimed in January that it wants its hand-picked members of Congress to be beholden to it and for the rest of Congress to fear it because it has the power to take or make political careers. So, the organization is a power monger pedaling fear in a democracy.

If anything, the attack on Snowe, Voinovich and Houghton by the Club for Growth indicates that these three politicians are neither beholden nor afraid. In Maine, that streak of independence is a vote-winning characteristic.


Spirit of rebirth


The Easter season’s celebration of the spirit and hope of new life has deep meaning this year as freedom appears re-born in Iraq.

Liberation wasn’t the chief reason for launching Operation Iraqi Freedom, but it is the happy consequence.

Rebuilding a country that now suffers both physical and political destruction will not be easy.

The pain already evident in cities without power or water, where looters have ravaged museums and businesses, cannot be reversed. Other Arab countries are openly angry about the invasion and the dead. The pain and anger will only deepen if differing views about reconstruction disintegrate into bickering about which interested parties should be involved or excluded, stalling forward motion.

Coalition forces may have liberated Iraq, but that doesn’t give us ownership. It does appoint us the responsibility to push culturally- and politically-appropriate reconstruction forward with the same speed as we advanced across the desert to Baghdad, though.

We owe that to the Iraqi people.
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