Telling It Like It Is

One of the most nettlesome, irritating things about the pro-war/anti-war ongoing pissing match (which, in a lot of figurative ways, strongly resembles sitting in the front row at a Gallagher concert when he gets out the sledgo-o-matic), at least to my way of thinking, has been how quick lefties have been to accuse us "neocons" of "impugning my patriotism" whenever we tee off on their empty-headed seditions. Well, actually, that's really a minor sticking point; what has repeatedly driven me up the wall is how hyper-reflexively defensive we've been about it, going out of our way to preface any criticism of the jihadi-symps by bending over backwards to stress that it's not the patriotism we're questioning, but their judgment. Even former Dem senator Zell Miller did that in the midst of his fire & brimstone keynote speech at the GOP convention last summer. Personally, I've never understood the need to bother, since no matter how much we assure them that we're not questioning their patriotism, they still accuse us of it anyway. If anything, the charge is more frequent and vehement for all of our collective attempts to pre-empt it.

It seems like a complete waste of time to me. Especially since liberal patriotism (an oxymoron if ever there was one) is, based simply upon the recent public comments of top Democrat party poobahs, highly questionable, and robustly deserves to be challenged. Gratifyingly, Tony Blankley concurs in his column this morning:

What are rational people to make of Howard Dean's statement that "the idea that we're going to win the war is an idea that, unfortunately, is just plain wrong"? In what sense does he "want" us not to fail in Iraq? Now, this is where the definition of want comes in. It is technically true that since DNC Chairman Dean says "unfortunately," he can make the argument that he wants victory, he wants the war objectives (establishing democracy in Iraq and protecting our homeland by so doing). Dr. Dean can make that claim, at the verbally technical level, even as he openly admits that he supports substantive policies (immediate withdrawal of our troops) that will assure the non-attainment of those goals....

It may be true that Howard Dean subjectively wants to protect our homeland and see Democracy reign in Iraq. But others are entitled to assert that the policy he advocates - losing the war immediately - objectively is not in the best interest of Iraqi democracy and the protection of our homeland.

In other words, even as Donks' crypto-treasonous rhetoric grows more and more brazen, they still insist upon having it both ways by in effect retaining monopoly control over the right to define the word "patriotism".

Blankely says, "Oh, no, you don't":

As to....making our homeland safe - while it is, just barely, open to debate, I believe we should have that debate. Precisely, we should have the debate that some politicians are prepared to risk our national security by calling for immediate withdrawal. Responsible national Democrats, such as Senator Joe Biden, are as adamant as President Bush that the consequences of immediate withdrawal would be catastrophic to our national security.

Democrats (and, for that matter, Republicans) who call for immediate withdrawal should be accused of objectively threatening our national security. Let's have that debate. Politicians who call for immediate withdrawal should not be entitled to claim, as Mrs. Albight does, that they are acting in the best interest of our national security - whatever they may subjectively think.

Amen, brother. If you walk like a duck and quack like a duck, you shouldn't enjoy carte blanche to force everybody around you to call you a flying bison. Libs are the least worthy people in the country of being exempt from accountability for their words and actions, and people like Chairman How and Jack (Rabbit) Murtha (and our old, dear, "redeemed" friend Jane Fonda, who, in an email to the Washington Post echoed John Kerry's "GIs are terrorists" smear) are fully deserving only of the hell they should be getting from an outraged American public.

Weekly Standard executive editor Bill Kristol set a very good example on FNC this morning:

Bill Kristol, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, said Senators Harry Reid (D-NV) and Carl Levin (D-MI) are "crazy” if they believe that Americans don’t want to win in Iraq.

Kristol, appearing Wednesday on Fox News Channel, made his comments in response to a press conference called by the Democrats prior to President Bush’s speech Wednesday on the progress in Iraq and the war on terrorism.

Reid and Levin, looking grim during the press conference, both droned about how the President’s plan to "stay the course” in Iraq does not give hope to Americans living in the United States.

"This nation roots for success,” Kristol said. "If the war goes badly, they’ll blame President Bush, and rightly so. But they [Reid and Levin] looked defeatist, like they are half-rooting for failure.

Okay, so Kristol's broadside could have been better. For one thing, Reid and Levin didn't look like they were "half-rooting" at all - they were acting as though crushing American defeat was an already-established fact, which is all the more ironic given that that is precisely the outcome they seek to engineer. And if President Bush were bully-able into caving to their cut & run insistences, you could take it to the bank that they would blame the resulting disaster on Bush, not for heeding their white-flag counsel, but for fighting the terrorists, in Iraq and anywhere else, in the first place. As far as they'd be concerned, nary a one of their fingerprints would be detectable on Iraq's corpse, or the knife buried and twisted to the hilt in Dubya's back.

Kristol doesn't think Americans will buy it any more than the President does - which may explain Donk brazenness:

"They are so grudging in their praise for Bush and the Iraqi people who are turning out to vote in this week’s elections at a great personal sacrifice, that I think Americans will reject or dismiss their comments completely.”

Kristol said the Democrats are foolishly and appallingly pinning their hopes on future setbacks in Iraq to help drive down President Bush’s approval numbers, which have been rising in the past few weeks.

"Politically, patriotically and from a human point of view, I don’t understand why these Democrats don’t lay off the politics and just watch the voting over the next few days,” he said. "Americans are rooting for victory – for our soldiers and for the Iraqi people.”

I understand it completely. Politically, Democrats inhabit an alternative dimension that rarely, if ever, intersects with reality, an extremist echo chamber in which they manage to convince themselves of the craziest notions, and that said notions are massively popular with the American public. They've been trapped in this dynamic ever since George Bush became president, it's cost them the past two election cycles, and the '06 hat trick is warming up in the on-deck circle. Their party boasts no patriots outside of Joe Lieberman, and they've pretty much disowned him. And while I wouldn't go so far as to describe libs as "inhuman," I think it's fair to say that if getting their power back meant the deaths of all twenty-five million Iraqis, it's a price that most Democrats would be willing to pay. And from their point of view, why not? For them it'd be "house money" anyway, Bush would get the blame, and besides, did any of them even notice the three million Indochinese that perished as a direct result of the last time the American Left insisted upon abandoning an "unwinnable" war?

It's interesting and telling that Senator Levin was part of that "prebuttal" to the President's latest "fireside chat," given his passionate fondness for the "objective" reporting of al-Jazeera (h/t CQ):

J. Dorrance Smith, the nominee, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed session about an opinion article in which he accused U.S. television networks of helping terrorists through the networks' partnerships with al-Jazeera.

The article has sparked concern among committee members and has prompted Senator Carl M. Levin (D-MI) to pledge to defeat Smith's nomination to be assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

"I have deep concerns about whether or not he should be representing the United States government and the Department of Defense with that kind of attitude and approach," Levin said after yesterday's hearing.

"What," Cap'n Ed asks, "got Levin's knickers in a twist? Smith wrote this about al-Jazeera and its influence on American media":

In an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal in April, Smith wrote: "Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and al Qaeda have a partner in Al-Jazeera and, by extension, most networks in the U.S. This partnership is a powerful tool for the terrorists in the war in Iraq."

Smith also singled out U.S. networks, saying: "Al-Jazeera has very strong partners in the U.S. - ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN and MSNBC. Video aired by Al-Jazeera ends up on these networks, sometimes within minutes."

Ah, well, that explains the problem that Levin has with Smith's "attitude and approach" - he's a straight-talking truth-teller, evidently in the mold of John Bolton, and Levin won't stand for anything less than the same sort of weasly, collaborationist prevaricator he and his fellow-travelers are. He's perfectly willing to cry, "We're all dhimmis now!" on the way to six o'clock Mecca-bowing if it means that our Islamist overlords will grant him the power they obsessively chase.

Am I questioning Levin's - or Reid's, or Fonda's, or Murtha's, etc., patriotism? Not at all - but only in the sense that it is not possible to question a nullity. It is precisely that sin of omission that Republicans need to highlight from the rooftops for every single one of the next 328 days.