EDITORIAL - The Congress recently passed an Iraq supplemental spending bill that included billions upon billions of unrelated spending in areas like peanut storage, renovations to government buildings in Washington D.C. and funding to improve a visitor's experience when touring the Capital building. Surely these politicians know this bill has no chance at passing, right?

Along with the unrelated spending, the bill sets a time line for troop withdrawal from Iraq, clearly an idea opposed in the strongest terms by the White House. Any politician who honestly thinks the president would consider signing a bill like that may be using the wrong combination of medication.

In actuality, this may be a clever ploy on the part of the new majority in Congress to solidify a talking point for the 2008 presidential elections. A bill that includes a time table for withdrawal and billions of dollars of unrelated spending has little chance of passing, even in a Bush administration that is no stranger to signing huge spending bills. The Democrats know this. They know this bill has no chance at passing.

Why go to the trouble and expense of drafting a bill like this and devoting the resources needed to get it passed through Congress, then? This bill is a talking point. When President Bush vetoes this bill, as we expect he will, the Democrats will then say to their illustrious constituency, “We tried!” This bill's ammunition can be used in an attempt to prove to their supporter base that, if not for those Republicans, the war would be over. “We passed the bill to bring our troops home. It is the Republican's fault.”

We live in a disgusting political climate. Politics today focus more on simple claims to fame than it does on actual and objective successes in Washington D.C. Much of the U.S. population will believe almost anything they hear, and using the “We tried” card during the 2008 presidential election circuit, already well underway, is a card that the new Congressional majority simply couldn't pass up.

Pay no attention to the fact that our tax dollars went to support a bill that both political parties in Congress knew did not have a shot in the dark of passing. Try to forget the fact that our Congress is spending hundreds of hours concocting lousy pieces of legislation in the hopes of scoring political advantage in 2008. Do your best to ignore the fact that our politicians have failed to do the people's work in the past several decades. Clearly, those topics are not important to our Congress.

What is important to Congress is political advantage. The thought that legislation can be cleverly crafted to spin up the ill-conceived notion that one party really is “trying”, while the other merely wants to bring America down into the sewers, is disingenuous at best and reprehensible at worst. The fact is the entire Congress is in the sewer; the sewer of self-righteousness.

This bill should be a disgrace to any believer in limited government, and even those who support a time table set on withdrawal from Iraq. The billions of dollars earmarked to unrelated pet projects, and the suggestion of a time table that no politician could reasonably assume would pass the White House, makes this bill an embarrassing example of what our government is capable of doing with our tax dollars.

Never forget the fact that we elect these politicians, and we could just as easily throw them out.