You didn't really think that I and everybody else were going to stop this- did you?

WASHINGTON — Rep. Eric Massa is getting a little heat down here. He’s revealing signs of actually reading the details of legislation, understanding it and most dangerously — to him — keeping his election campaign promises.

They impress funny ideas into you at the Naval Academy, like honor.

The retired Navy commander, Desert Storm veteran, Democrat and cancer survivor works a district gerrymandered for a Republican, stretching from Salamanca, across to Elmira and up toward Rochester.

Massa was the only member from upstate New York last week to vote against the $106 billion bill to fund the Obama administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the next three months and 10 days, and he is catching it from Republicans for the vote.

Massa’s reason is that he promised voters in his losing 2006 race and last year in the campaign he narrowly won that he would oppose spending any money on the Iraq adventure unless the White House offered a rock-solid date for getting out of there.

President Obama played charades last year when he said things that sounded like he would pull us out of Iraq in 18 months but then backed away, and now whipped along by the military-industrial complex, Obama is becoming more deeply entwined in the timeless enigma of Afghanistan.

It’s not just about money. Through June 6, 94 U.S. service personnel died in Iraq this year. In Afghanistan, the number of American military deaths is already 76, according to iCasualties.org, a respected Web site.

The $106 billion sailed through, of course. Hardly anybody here doesn’t like war. It’s a pity though, that only 50 House Democrats could suck up the courage to vote against Iraq money after all that Obama said about it since 2007.

Massa also voted against sending $1.5 billion in unrestricted cash that the State Department will spend, probably on more bribes, in Pakistan. “At a time when thousands here at home worry day to day about feeding their families, I cannot support significantly increasing the size of the U.S. State Department abroad,” Massa said. His only error was failing to note that nobody in Pakistan ever accounted for the $10 billion the Bush administration sent there, only to see the Taliban make new incursions against that corrupt regime.

Then Massa said something plainly un-Democratic, certainly for a New York Democrat: “This is a time for us all to do more with less, not more with more.”

Washington’s war party is now accusing Massa, of all people, of “not supporting our troops.” It’s the same ultra-conservative claque that’s taunting Obama for failing to make bellicose statements about the rigged election in Iran.

The group includes Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and the toxic Sean Hannity, but more notably neo-conservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, who are famous for founding the Project for a New American Century.

With schemers Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, later respectively vice president and defense secretary, Kristol and Kagan lobbied for military intervention in Iraq. President Bill Clinton resisted them, lacking the taste for blood his successor had.

Obama, so far, has responded correctly to the Iranian crisis. He has voiced support for the anti-regime demonstrators but recognized this country’s dark history of meddling in Iranian affairs.

“We want to avoid the U.S. being the issue inside Iran,” Obama said, wisely.

Notably, our history includes joining with the British in 1953 to unseat the democratically elected secular government headed by Mohammed Mossadegh. We replaced him with a dictator, whose brutality over a quarter of a century, at our behest, fomented an Islamic revolution and our hostage crisis of 1979-80. Every Iranian school child is taught our role in thwarting their freedom. All but the ultra-right in this country recognizes the limits to hypocrisy.

dturner@buffnews.com