Petraeus Plays To The Freak Show

Some more random takes on the "vulgar, outrageous" treatment of the man who knows Iraq better than Ted Kennedy knows the inside of his martini kegs (via El Rushbo).

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Remember how Code Pink got into the House version of the Petraeus interrogation yesterday? Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) evidently reacted in a way you'd never suspect of a Donk pol - he got indignant. Threatened to have them prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for their disorderly conduct.

Well, when Round Two before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commenced, the CPers were back for more. How did they manage such an encore? Well, either the Capitol Police overdosed at Dunkin Donuts this morning, or the Democrats made sure Mother Sheehan and friends had front row seats.

Hey, moveon.org did the marquis for this event; Code Pink provided the groupies, I guess.

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When I logged on this AM I saw the obligatory AP "Republicans grill General Petraeus" headline. That typically means the usual handful of RINOs. Imagine my lack of surprise when the first "GOP" name to come up was Chuck "Shark-Jumper" Hagel. Here's a chunk of his insufferable gibbering:

As you each have responsibilities, we are elected by the people of our states. To question strategy is not unpatriotic. I've always found that you want an honest evaluation, not through charts, not through the White House evaluations, you ask a sergeant or a corporal what they think. I'll bet on them every time. We've got too many disconnects here, General, way too many disconnects. Come on! Our national intelligence report earlier this year said we're in a civil war. It's sectarian violence. You gave us a great inventory of what a brutal, bloody dictator Saddam was. Well, we know that. That's not the issue here. Are we going to continue to invest American blood and treasure at the same rate we are doing now? For what? President said, "Let's buy time." Buy time? For what?

For stabilizing Iraq and moving onto the next stage of the war, the showdown with Iran, Senator. It's not all that complicated to deduce, which suggests that you're either too stupid to connect those dots or too pigheaded in your willful blindness to abandon your obsolete anti-war narrative and actually pay attention to what General Petraeus came halfway around the world to tell you. Like he needed to travel thousands of miles to have his time wasted and his character insulted by you just so your Enemy Media suckholes can depict this exercise in grotesquery as "bipartisan."

Hagel announced this week that he will not be seeking another term in the Senate in 2008. Not that we needed another demonstration of why, but this one does quite nicely. The Senate GOP will miss him about as much as a bucket of medical waste.

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The Boston Balker took his turn vomiting on the man whose shoes he's not worthy to shine with his sphincterized face. But even after reading his comments, I still can't quite remember what Lurch said, other than another several dozen Vietnam references.

Did you know John Kerry served there, and would have single-handedly won the war for America if he hadn't had to come home and become the biggest backstabber since Benedict Arnold got shot off his horse? I'm surprised Mr. Heinz didn't order the General to "drop and give him twenty".

Did you know that John Kerry is a U.S. senator? Did you know that John Kerry is not, after all, missing? But that he has the ability to make himself invisible for long stretches of time?

At least his work ethic is a match for his eloquence. If his colleagues were equally as indolent, the country wouldn't be in such comprehensive peril.

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And yet, in the midst of all the character assassination, all the boorish screeching, all the pompous assholery, all the cliche-mongering, all the ignorant sermonizing, and of course, all the Vietnam references, there was something uttered by Barbara Boxer that did what I thought impossible: utterly floor me with its stunningly candid lunacy.

See if you can sift through all the years-ago discredited left-wing cliche chaff to find the kernel of SUPER-chaff:

No, it's not the not very subtle endorsement of Hillary Rodham for president. No, it's not the ludicrous falsehood that liberating Iraq as a designated theatre for luring al Qaeda to its systematic doom "took our eye off defeating the terrorists". No, it's not her attempt to "Katrina-ize" the next big California earthquake.

Give up? It's her nostalgia for 9/11. Barbara Boxer actually believes that America was never better strategically positioned in the world than on the day when foreign enemies invaded our country, tried (and but for the heroic sacrifice of the passengers aboard Flight 93, may well have succeeded) to decapitate our government, and massacred three thousand American civilians.

What does "we had the whole world in our hand" mean? It means we were the object of "official" sympathy from muted outposts of anti-Americanism like Russia, Red China, and the European Union, whose interests were nonetheless advanced by al Qaeda six years ago today. Whatever their brief Hallmarkish rhetoric, these rivals want to see us diminished, restrained, and humbled, so that they can supplant us in the global economy and on the world stage.

So, not coincidentally, do people like Babsy Boxer, whose concept of our strategic national interest is akin to a neurotic mourningfest that will require many more mass-casualty attacks in order to "atone for Bush's biggest foreign policy mistake ever" and "get the world back in our hand." Such a "happy" outcome is a lot less likely if we finish crushing al Qaeda and Iran's Shiite proxies. Ditto her party's finishing its table-running in 2008, which is another way of illustrating, yet again, the incapability of liberals to distinguish "national interest" from their own rabid partisanism.

Incidentally, "the whole world" was not "officially" sympathetic to our plight six years ago today. The Muslim world celebrated like al Qaeda had just won the friggin' Super Bowl. That's the "world" reaction that matters, because it was the most honest, guileless, and uncalculated. A year and a half later the same terrorist states that were dancing in the streets at Uncle Sam's nose-bloodying were either hiding in spider holes (like the deposed Saddam Hussein), cowering in fear that they were next on Dubya's hit list (like Libya's Muammar Khaddafy), or keeping a verrrrrrry low profile (like the Iranian mullagharchy).

The reason we're still trying to stabilize Iraq today, and the reason that risible dolts like Chuck Hagel and John Finger Kerry and BB-brain are sitting on their fat asses passing moral and professional judgment over a four-star general of thirty-five years' peerless service to his country who may have saved Iraq from the genocidal fate to which his interlocutors are STILL trying to consign it is that George Bush didn't finish the war when he had the chance. He limited "combat operations" to Iraq only, went over to the defensive, and guaranteed that Iran and Syria could feed "insurgents" and weapons into Iraq indefinitely, and certainly long enough to outlast the modern American attention span, to say nothing of our wheezing martial stamina.

In the longer term, it's still difficult to see how that won't still be the ultimate outcome absent taking the war to Iran itself. But the "Surge" has, indeed, provided a "breathing space," both for the once-besieged Iraqi government and the still-besieged Bush White House, much to the enraged chagrin of their common enemies.

General Petraeus and the 160,000 troops under his command have their collective boot on the terrorists' throat; the Dhimmicrats' crazed attempts this week to pry it loose while making themselves sound like they're auditioning for cameo shots in bin Laden's next video ought to comparably prostrate their 2008 moon-shooting prospects.

And who knows - it just might.

After all, even Allah is not above moving in mysterious ways.