More Rhetorical Questions, Now That It's Safe To Ask Them

The 2006 election is safely in the can, their party has its legislative power back, and its regaining of the White House in two years is a mere formality, so it is evidently only now that the Enemy Media feels safe in broaching questions that, had they been brought up two or three months ago, might have caused voters myopically obsessed with "punishing" the Republicans to stop and think before stampeding off that left cliff:

A four-figure number hovers fifty feet over a busy Philadelphia street, visible in an office window. It changes maybe once or twice a day like the cost of something.

A janitor once stopped, just to stare. "I see that number, and it makes me cry," he told Celeste Zappala, who keeps the running tally.

It is a number that strongly moves American opinion: the U.S. military's death toll in Iraq. Zappala's son, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, is one of the dead.

Parenthetical observation: Think this asshole voted for Rick Santorum?

Other makeshift memorials rise up across the country as reminders of the war's human cost: flags planted in honor of the dead on the National Mall in Washington, symbolic tombstones at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, signs with fallen soldiers' names plastered to telephone polls outside Boston.

Americans may question this war for many reasons, but their doubts often find voice in the count of U.S. war deaths. An overwhelming majority - 84% - worry that the war is causing too many casualties, according to a September poll by the nonpartisan research group Public Agenda.

The country largely kept the faith during World War II, even as about 400,000 U.S. forces died - 20,000 just in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge. Before turning against the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Americans tolerated thousands more deaths than in Iraq.

Has something changed? Do Americans somehow place higher value on the lives of their soldiers now? Do they expect success at lower cost? Or do most simply dismiss this particular war as the wrong one - hard to understand and harder to win - and so not worth the losses?

Oh. My. God. Don't you just love how the ASSociated Press sits back and purports to portray this from the perch of "objective" "dispassionate" analyst, as though they and the rest of the press establishment had nothing, NOTHING I say, to do with bulldozing public opinion in that direction? As though they hadn't spent the past four years as relentless, shrill, bellicose pro-Islamist/Bushophobic propagandists. As though they hadn't used every opportunity every single day to harp indefatigueably on the "mounting American death toll" and how Iraq is "George Bush's war" and has nothing to do with the WAIF (War Against Islamic Fundamentalism) and how he "lied us into it" and how we're "torturers" and "warmongers" who have made Iraq infinitely worse than it was in the halcyon, pristine days of Saddam Hussein (may Allah bless him with gonadal overload and an eternal supply of Viagra with his 72 virgins)'s benevolent rule. And, of course, how we "can't win" there and our troops are therefore "dying for nothing" - oops, I should say "dying for a lie," shouldn't I? - and need to be gotten out of the Middle East entirely so the region can "begin to recover."

For four years the (pick your euphemism - "elite media," "mainstream media," "journalism profession") has buried the American people, largely unopposed by the White House and congressional GOPers and hopelessly overwhelming the stalwart but comparitively tiny blogosphere, under a perpetual avalanche of "Vietnamizing" of the WAIF. And it finally, inevitably, had its desired effect: the American people put the Democrats back in power, and they will force a full retreat from and unilateral surrender in Iraq and the WAIF in general.

And yet the AP has the unmitigated gall to ask whether the American people have "lost their stomach for sacrifice"? That's like torching an apartment building in the middle of the night and then feigning scholarly discourse over why the tenants are more afraid of fire.

It ought to make President Bush's mission clear, though: win the war - and that means defeating Iran and Syria, at a minimum - in the next two years, even if it means sacrificing his presidency. Because with the new political alignment being a lot more permanent, IMHO, than anybody current suspects, and with President Hillary on the horizon and closing fast, this will be our last chance at victory before strategic disaster overtakes us for good.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn isn't a 2007 optimist, either.

UPDATE II: The New York Times really did eulogize Saddam Hussein, today. But even that doesn't beat the WESH (Orlando, Florida's NBC affiliate) anchor who reported that the ex-Iraqi dictator had been "assassinated" - doubtless as an offering by the Iraqi "puppet" government (There IS no legitimate government but Saddam's, doncha know) to its American "overlords" to enable the latter to continue justifying their "brutal occupation."

I'll say it again: the Left, in all its guises and haunts, will never stop its permanent campaign to permanently rule (and/or ruin) America by this sort of aggressive, outrageously despicable propaganda agitation. The sooner the Right accepts that the domestic jihad is as permanent as the overseas variety and starts fighting to win by playing for keeps - and fighting fire with fire - the greater the possibility that America might just survive after all.

That is not, however, the way to bet.