Not-So-Strange Bedfellows

At home and abroad, the Left is finding more and more in common with our Islamist enemies.

First, take a gander at what Jonathan Rothenberg unearthed a few days ago:

At first it seemed that liberals were blinded by politics. Unable through the ballot box to halt or reverse the progress of our elected President's foreign policy, they are seeking to make it more difficult to implement by savaging America's reputation abroad and inciting hatred against the United States. But it appears that extreme American leftists do not merely accept the collateral damage to America from their politically motivated attacks on our government, but that they actually share al-Qaeda's goal: destruction of America as we know it.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is leading the charge to tarnish America's image and free the Guantanamo terrorists. CCR founder William Kuntsler was direct about his group's goal:

"I stay in this profession only because I want to be a double agent, to destroy the whole fucking [U.S.] system."

We can each individually debate whether this is seditious, treasonous or simply execrable. CCR's "clients" have included numerous terrorists, including those involved in the murder of FBI agents, the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, and several cop-killings.

Rothenberg goes on to cut so-called "mainstream" Democrats a bit more slack than that, which is something I'm not sure I can do in the wake of Senator Ali Dickbar al-Durbini's performance last week. Seems to me there has to be a Rubicon beyond which the benefit of the doubt is no longer merited, if not an outright abandonment of common sense.

This take is reinforced by the European equivalent that Ed Morrissey discovered just yesterday:

Who's funding the insurgents in Iraq? The list of suspects is long: ex-Baathists, foreign jihadists, and angry Sunnis, to name a few. Now add to that roster hard-core Euroleftists.

Turns out that far-left groups in western Europe are carrying on a campaign dubbed Ten Euros for the Resistance, offering aid and comfort to the car bombers, kidnappers, and snipers trying to destabilize the fledgling Iraq government. In the words of one Italian website, Iraq Libero (Free Iraq), the funds are meant for those fighting the occupanti imperialisti. The groups are an odd collection, made up largely of Marxists and Maoists, sprinkled with an array of Arab emigres and aging, old-school fascists, according to Lorenzo Vidino, an analyst on European terrorism based at The Investigative Project in Washington, D.C. "It's the old anticapitalist, anti-U.S., anti-Israel crowd," says Vidino, who has been to their gatherings, where he saw activists from Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Italy. "The glue that binds them together is anti-Americanism."

The groups are working on an October conference to further support "the Iraqi Resistance." A key goal is to expand backing for the insurgents from the fringe left to the broader antiwar and antiglobalization movements.

Understand that what they're resisting is Iraqi freedom and self-determination, and the spread of that breath of fresh air throughout a region that has never before experienced it - a trend that will, if continued, add immeasurably to the safety and security of the entire world.

Again, I have to ask - especially in light of the UN Oily Food scandal - how much of a difference there is between "hardcore Euroleftists" and the perfidious leaders of "Old Europe" that were Saddam Hussein's most stalwart defenders (and prolific clients) outside the Arab world. And that, in turn, leads to the question of why (as Mark Noonan irritatingly likes to put it) "our" Democrats are so obsessed with currying the favor of these people, such that they're willing (apparently) to quit the GWOT, turn loose all the jihadis, and sit back and wait for them to descend on us in a fiery orgy of chaos and death.

Do they really not expect that last part? Can any sane, functional mind really be that naive with the 9/11 attacks - the product of that very discredited mindset - not even four years in the past?

At the very least, that's a question that Republicans ought to be publicly challenging "mainstream" Democrats to answer.

Kind of like Karl the Great did the other day.