‘On the Media’ Runs My Correction on House Vote Against War

One of my favorite public radio shows, “On the Media”, occasionally makes mistakes, and last week I noticed one. As usual, I sent off a note, but since I listened to the show’s podcast late in the week, and didn’t send my email until late Thursday afternoon, I definitely wasn’t expecting to hear my own name when I listened to the Letters segment in this week’s podcast on Saturday.

This was my letter:

Just a correction, but when you were talking with Bob Hennelly about the Menendez race in New Jersey last week, he said that Menendez “had the distinction of being one of the few House members” to vote against the resolution used by President Bush as a justification for war.

In actuality, 126 Democratic members of the House voted against H.J. 114, “To Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”, along with 6 Republicans and 1 Independent. That was a solid majority of the Democrats in the House, 81 voted for the resolution and one abstained.

For the record, 21 of the 50 Democratic Senators voted against the Senate version of the resolution. With the “nay” votes of either Jim Jeffords (I-VT) or Lincoln Chaffee (R-RI), a change in the votes of 29 Democrats — including most of the potential Senate contenders for the 2008 presidential race — could have put the brakes on the Iraq war in the Senate by a vote of 48-52, but they were too spineless to stand up and demand actual proof of the claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.

For that matter, even in the House where they were in a minority, if all of the Democrats who voted “yea” had voted the other way, the vote would have been 215-214.

Their actions of four years ago don’t exactly fill me with trust that they’re going to perform any better after election day.