John Spragens, representing his boss in the U.S. House, told Mary Mancini and Freddy O'Connell that Jim Cooper voted for the bill to condemn a newspaper ad because it was insensitive to "a soldier fighting for his country." However, Spragens also seemed to suggest that Rep. Cooper was simply voting for it to "make the issue go away," and to evade questioning as to whether he should condemn the authors of the ad.
So, was it a vote of conviction or a vote of expedience? It looks to me like the usual Democratic attempt to nuance and to finesse polarizing issues rather than giving back as good as they got. Kudos to Mary for trying a couple of times to refer to the hypocrisy of targeting Moveon.org but not Rush Limbaugh (who denigrated as "phoney" those soldiers who didn't agree with the Iraq policy) even though Mr. Spragens countered that "everybody's sick of it" and he suggested that fighting Republicans "tit-for-tat" was a distraction when solders are dying in Iraq.
I only wish that Mr. Cooper would have seen beforehand that reaching for expedience in voting to condemn Moveon.org was itself a form of strategic maneuver (or tit-for-tat) against Republicans, and thus, itself a distraction from the reality of soldiers in harm's way in Iraq. By the way, any undefiled conviction to protect a General from a newspaper ad (with no tit to the tat intended) is also a distraction from the Iraq War.
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