Holocaust Survivor Stepping Down

The only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress is retiring.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rep. Tom Lantos, who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and is the only Holocaust survivor elected to the Congress, on Wednesday said he has been diagnosed with cancer and will not seek re-election in November.

The 79-year-old California Democrat, who was born in Hungary and twice escaped Nazi labor camps, said he will serve the remainder of his 14th term, which ends in January 2009.

In announcing he has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus and would end his House career at the end of his term, Lantos reflected on his life.

"It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress," Lantos said.

Shortly after Lantos came to Congress in 1981, he pushed for legislation granting honorary U.S. citizenship to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. That came nearly four decades after Wallenberg protected Lantos and other occupants of an apartment building from Nazi arrest.

Throughout his congressional career, Lantos was an outspoken critic of international human rights abuses.

Lantos helped win passage in 2002 of a congressional resolution authorizing the U.S. attack on Iraq that unfolded the following year. More recently, Lantos has been critical of the "U.S. involvement in the civil war in Iraq."

When Democrats gained majority control of the House a year ago, Lantos used his new position as chairman of the foreign affairs panel to conduct oversight of the Iraq war, including a high-profile hearing last September on progress from the U.S. troop increase.

Of course, Bradley Smith, David Duke, and Hutton Gibson all deny the existence of of Rep. Lantos, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.

Calling a Liar a Liar

cross-posted at Watching Those We Chose

It's nice to finally read a Washington columnist calling Bush a liar when he lies. New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Frank Rich (subscription required for full column) does just that:

As if to confirm we’re in the last throes, President Bush threw any remaining caution to the winds during his news conference in the Rose Garden that same morning. Almost everything he said was patently misleading or an outright lie, a sure sign of a leader so entombed in his bunker (he couldn’t even emerge for the Washington Nationals’ ceremonial first pitch last week) that he feels he has nothing left to lose.

Incredibly, he chided his adversaries on the Hill for going on vacation just as he was heading off for his own vacation in Crawford. Then he attacked Congress for taking 57 days to “pass emergency funds for our troops” even though the previous, Republican-led Congress took 119 days on the same bill in 2006. He ridiculed the House bill for “pork and other spending that has nothing to do with the war,” though last year’s war-spending bill was also larded with unrelated pork, from Congressional efforts to add agricultural subsidies to the president’s own request for money for bird-flu preparation.

Mr. Bush’s claim that military equipment would be shortchanged if he couldn’t sign a spending bill by mid-April was contradicted by not one but two government agencies. A Government Accountability Office report faulted poor Pentagon planning for endemic existing equipment shortages in the National Guard. The Congressional Research Service found that the Pentagon could pay for the war until well into July. Since by that point we’ll already be on the threshold of our own commanders’ late-summer deadline for judging the surge, what’s the crisis?

The president then ratcheted up his habitual exploitation of the suffering of the troops and their families — a button he had pushed five days earlier when making his six-weeks-tardy visit to pose for photos at scandal-ridden Walter Reed. “Congress’s failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines,” he said. “And others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to.”

Emphasis mine.

Let's be very clear. Congress passed a supplemental spending bill. Congress funded our troops. George W. Bush says he'll veto that bill. So it is George W. Bush, president, commander in chief, who is failing "to fund our troops on the front lines [meaning] that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines."

In fact, it is Congress who is trying to bring ALL military families' loved ones home from the front lines and prevent any from heading back to the war. Forget about the "sooner than they need to." Congress wants to make sure NO military families' loved ones head back to the war.

This is George Bush's war. Congress has funded the troops. George Bush is the one shortchanging them.