No Open-and-Shut Case

Rep. Mike McNulty (N.Y.), a nine-term Democrat, never served in the military, but his reasons for opposing President Bush's strategy in Iraq and his planned vote today against the latest version of the bill to fund the conflict are no less poignant.

In 1970, McNulty lost an older brother, William, to the Vietnam War. William, who was a twin and was drafted as a Navy medic, stepped on a land mine in Quang Nam province and died while "patching up his buddies, which was his daily responsibility," the congressman says.

McNulty himself received a medical exemption for Vietnam because he had contracted polio as a young child. He says losing his brother was particularly difficult for him because "I was very much anti the Vietnam War."

While his brother was deployed to active duty, McNulty found an opportunity to testify on the war at a field hearing in his district in the spring of 1970. "What I related to some of my colleagues lobbying for my vote is that when I think back on the memory of testifying, I think if President Nixon listened to people like me back in 1970, my brother might never have died," he says.

"Fast-forward to today and I think this war will go down as one of the biggest blunders in the history of warfare, and I am not going to give the president a blank check to enable him to keep the war going through the end of this administration."

McNulty did vote to authorize the Iraq war, because, he says, he was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After the Iraq Study Group report "debunked all of the reasons for getting into the war in the beginning," he says, he stopped voting for funding.

"What really bothered me was the persistent story by the administration that Iraq was within 12 months of nuclear capability," he says. Saddam Hussein "wasn't anywhere near the serious start of nuclear capability. . . . The administration made a mistake by giving us information that wasn't true, and I made a mistake by believing them."

McNulty says he admires House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for trying to put together a coalition to push for getting U.S. troops out of Iraq. But all of her proposals included money to fund the war at least through September, and he wants it stopped now. He said that when the speaker first called him to solicit his vote, he told her about his brother.

" 'I'm deeply sorry for your loss and I accept your position,' " McNulty says Pelosi told him. "She never called me again or had anyone else call me. They just accepted my personal feelings and respected it."

Talk About Reinventing Yourself

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) fessed up during her commencement address at Eastern Connecticut State on Sunday that she wasn't born a serious legislator.

"I once worked as a go-go dancer," she told the students, although her mother had hoped she would become a doctor or lawyer.

"Thank you for this honorary doctor of law," she added in remarks reported by the Examiner. "Now I can tell her I am both."

Her office understandably didn't seem too eager to make her available for an interview to further discuss the dancing gig.

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