Kline Learns to Blog

So, after successfully completing his 2006 re-election campaign without putting any substance on his campaign web site, and after mischaracterizing (whether out of ignorance or malice) the work I did on Coleen Rowley's campaign weblog, John Kline has decided that it's high time that he make his blogging debut on The Hill Blog, a weblog for members of Congress and other policy insiders in D.C.

And what is the topic which has finally motivated Kline to break his online silence? New York Democrat Charlie Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft.

The American people need to fasten their seat belts because Democrats are taking us back to the Sixties. On cue, the Democratic leadership is once again abandoning the mainstream and lurching to the left.

For months, they ran a campaign trying to convince voters they would govern from the middle. Yet, here we are, two months before Democrats officially regain the majority in the 110th Congress, and already incoming Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charley [sic] Rangel wants to pander to the liberal base of the Democratic Party and reinstitute the military draft.

In all sincerity, I have no idea why Kline bothered to write this. His thesis appears to be that a Democratic-led Congress will "lurch to the left" and reinstate the draft --- a thesis which he immediately undermines:

Why should anybody take Mr. Rangel's draft talk seriously? His lack of sincerity was exposed in 2004 when even he didn'’t vote for the bill he authored which would have reinstituted the military draft. In fact, his military draft proposal was defeated 402-2 in the House of Representatives.

Kline is correct that when Rangel introduced similar legislation in 2004, 186 Democrats voted against it, including Nancy Pelosi and Rangel himself, as Kline acknowledges. Instead of proving that the Democratic party is lurching to the left, Kline succeeds in proving precisely the opposite. He goes on to reject Rangel's proposal "on its merits", just as Pelosi has done.

Everyone with a shred of intellectual honesty accepts Rangel's proposal for what it is: an effort to initiate a discussion about shared sacrifice in a time of war, something which has been nonexistent during nearly four years in Iraq. It would have been worth the five paragraphs of effort Kline put into it if he had contributed something to such a discussion, but instead he wasted his time writing a self-refuting post which amounts to nothing more than whining.

Throughout the campaign, I was convinced that Kline was keeping his mouth shut in order to keep from saying anything foolish. This aimless rant about the draft suggests I was right.