Right Wing Nut House

Looks like the New York Times is a bit miffed at Karl Rove and the Bush Administration:

WASHINGTON, July 11 - Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House refused on Monday to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove’s role in the matter.

And that’s just the lead.

The Times senior editorial staff are obviously upset that one of their reporters, Judith Miller, sits rotting in a jail cell because she refuses to name her source or sources to Special Prosecutor Richard Fitzgerald in the “outing” of Valerie Plame, the CIA employee who sent her husband Joe Wilson to Nigeria in order to hobnob with government representatives poolside and “investigate” whether Saddam’s Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake uranium. Wilson received assurances from the Nigerians that this was not the case and subsequently accused the Bush Administration of lying about the transaction.

Wilson himself turned out to be the liar as it was discovered that, despite his repeated denials, his wife did indeed strongly recommend that he be the official to make the Nigeria trip. Wilson also was never able to ascertain whether or not the Nigerians were in fact supplying Iraq with yellow cake, despite repeatedly saying so in the Op-Ed pages of the Times and elsewhere.

In March of last year, the US removed 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from facilities in Iraq, enough to make more than 20 Hiroshima sized bombs.

Does it surprise you that those little nuggets of information are not in this New York Times story?

Make no mistake. The New York Times has declared all out war on the White House with this “news” report.” And they’re putting the White House on notice that they consider this “scandal” every bit as important as Watergate, Iran-Contra, or Clinton’s impeachment:

“The lesson of history for George Bush and Karl Rove is that the best way to help themselves is to bring out all the facts, on their own, quickly,” Mr. Schumer said, citing the second-term scandals that have beset previous administrations.

In two contentious news briefings, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, would not directly address any of a barrage of questions about Mr. Rove’s involvement, a day after new evidence suggested that Mr. Rove had discussed the C.I.A. officer with a Time magazine reporter in July 2003 without identifying her by name.

Under often hostile questioning, Mr. McClellan repeatedly declined to say whether he stood behind his previous statements that Mr. Rove had played no role in the matter, saying he could not comment while a criminal investigation was under way. He brushed aside questions about whether the president would follow through on his pledge, repeated just over a year ago, to fire anyone in his administration found to have played a role in disclosing the officer’s identity. And he declined to say when Mr. Bush learned that Mr. Rove had mentioned the C.I.A. officer in his conversation with the Time reporter.

Ironically, what might save Mr. Rove from prosecution (although his resignation may be in the cards) could be the liberal’s own hatred of the CIA and the how that hate translated into drawing up the legislation covering any crime Mr. Rove may have committed.

In the late 1970’s, CIA whistle blower Phillip Agee, in his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary, published the names of some covert operatives in Europe who ended up being assassinated. While it was impossible to tie Mr. Agee’s revelations to the killings, Congress, or at least the Republicans, was worried enough to pass a law against outing intelligence officials.

The debate on passage of the bill was rancorous with liberals screaming that such a law would discourage other whistle blowers from coming forward, thus depriving the left of any knowledge regarding sensitive intelligence operations. This debate was occurring a little more than 5 years after the infamous Church Committee hearings during which time morale at the CIA plummeted to an all time low and several of the more stupid and disastrous CIA operations were disclosed for the first time. It was during this time that Agee became a hero to the left, almost on par with the patron saint of whistle blowers Daniel Ellsberg, he of the Pentagon Papers fame.

The opposition to this law by the left back then has their protestations against Rove ringing hollow today.

The Times outlines the difficulties facing those who are salivating at the prospect of Rove doing the “perp walk”:

A prosecutor seeking to establish a violation of the law has to establish an intentional disclosure by someone with authorized access to classified information. That person must know that the disclosure identifies a covert agent “and that the United States was taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent’s intelligence relationship to the United States.” A covert agent is defined as someone whose identity is classified and who has served outside the United States within the last five years.

“We made it exceedingly difficult to violate,” Victoria Toensing, who was chief counsel to the Senate intelligence committee when the law was enacted, said of the law.

The e-mail message from Mr. Cooper to his bureau chief describing a brief conversation with Mr. Rove, first reported in Newsweek, does not by itself establish that Mr. Rove knew Ms. Wilson’s covert status or that the government was taking measures to protect her.

Based on the e-mail message, Mr. Rove’s disclosures are not criminal, said Bruce S. Sanford, a Washington lawyer who helped write the law and submitted a brief on behalf of several news organizations concerning it to the appeals court hearing the case of Mr. Cooper and Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times. Ms. Miller has gone to jail rather than disclose her source.

“It is clear that Karl Rove’s conversation with Matt Cooper does not fall into that category” of criminal conduct, Mr. Sanford said. “That’s not ‘knowing.’ It doesn’t even come close.”

Since, as the Times story makes clear, Rove is not a target of Fitzgerald’s probe I would have one word of caution for the Times and all you lefties out there who are preparing to charge up the hill and take no prisoners in this affair.

Tread carefully. When it comes out how many reporters actually knew that Valerie Plame was both Wilson’s wife and a CIA operative, this scandal could disappear overnight:

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

“She had a desk job in Langley,” said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.’s headquarters. “When you want someone in deep cover, they don’t go back and forth to Langley.”

Maybe a reporter mistook her super-secret authentic CIA decoder ring for evidence she was a spook.

UPDATE

I’ll have updates throughout the day as the blogswarm grows.

Captain Ed:

The New York Times plays the Rove card to the hilt today, putting their martyrdom of Judith Miller front and center while extending a mystery that the media created and the Times could immediately resolve. Instead, we get breathless accounts of non-comments from the White House that prompt 2,000-word front-page articles that wind up telling us nothing:

Why solve the mystery when there’s a feeding frenzy to feed?

Michelle Malkin points to the agressiveness of the White House Press Corps:

I actually have no problem with McClellan getting justifiably barked at during his daily briefings (if only we had more Les Kinsolvings to press the White House from the right, especially on illegal immigration). But isn’t it funny how Beltway reporters who get all prissy and whiny about one Fox News Channel reporter asking the DNC chairman one mildly aggressive question have no problem turning pack-rabid on McClellan?

Ah! But as you well know, Michelle, Fox doesn’t employ real journalists…only shills for the White House.

National Journal’s Beltway Blogroll has a great roundup of links mostly from the salivating left but also a few from the right.

Betsy Newmark makes a great point:

So the media can rant all they want, but days when we are at war in Iraq, terrorists are bombing Londoners on the way to work, North Korea and Iran are inches away from getting nuclear bombs, and it’s summer and vacation time, I don’t think most people outside the Beltway and the political blogosphere care one jot about Karl Rove.

One of the very things that’s giving life to this story - a news slowdown during the summer - could spell its doom for a long haul, wall to wall, feeding frenzy.

The Commissar believes (as I do) that Rove’s days are numbered - or at least they should be:

The problem is that Rove is more than just a key advisor, more than a member of the C-i-C’s inner circle. Rove and Bush go way back. Some might say that Rove “made” Bush. I don’t know if Bush can fire Rove. Not in a “skeletons in the closet” sense, but in a loyalty sense. Bush is famous for his loyalty; his loyalty to Rove has must be very, very strong. This will have to build to a typhoon-level storm that threatens to bring down Bush himself before Rove gets the axe.

Like Michelle, Lorie Byrd at Polipundit is focusing on the disgraceful exhibition yesterday by the White House Press Corps during their daily briefing with Scott McClellan. And she adds this:

I think that when the White House made their biggest mistake, though, was by not attacking Joe Wilson’s and Democrats’ lies earlier on. This was the beginning of the “Bush lied” mantra by the Democrats and it never should have been allowed. Democrats want to cry that Wilson was attacked by the White House, but by simply saying the guy misrepresented what was in his report and saying that he was not qualified in the first place and was only sent on the mission because his wife got him the job is not exactly hardball. If the Republicans ever grew a spine and decided to play hardball with the Democrats, even their buddies in the media could not save them from themselves.

I’m not sure the “Bush lied” meme started with the Joe Wilson imbroglio but Lorie is right that the White House too often ignored partisan attacks by the media which would later become urban legends. Like Bush saying that Saddam was involved directly in 9/11. Once its out there, a lie is a hard thing to knock down. And the vaunted Bush PR machine has done a piss poor job of handling issues like that.

In this relative calm before the storm of media frenzy hits the Rove-Wilson-Plame story, it’s well to remember two things:

1. It’s going to get worse before (if) it gets better for Rove
2. There’s no “there” there

If I were to hazard a guess, Rove will be forced to resign within a month. The reason won’t be due to any pending indictment or arrest, although I’ve seen several lefty blogs writing about one of their wet dreams that involves Rove doing the “perp walk.” It will happen because the coming feeding frenzy by the media will be enormously distracting to the Administration and Rove, like the good soldier he’s proven himself to be over the last 4 1/2 years, will realize it’s time to go.

The only thing that would stand in the way of a Rove resignation is the President himself. And on personnel matters, Bush at times has proven himself his own worst enemy. This is especially true in the national security sphere as he allowed George Tenet, the most spectacularly incompetent DCIA in history, to leave gracefully as well as allowing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to remain a stone around his neck for far too long.

As for the scandal itself, I’m sorry to disappoint you liberals out there but there really isn’t much to hang your hat on. The legal issues involved are something of a muddle . Here’s a good analysis from the left from Jeralyn Merritt of Talkleft:

I don’t think Karl Rove is looking at a perjury charge or a charge of unlawful disclosure of an undercover agent. I suspect that was made clear to Rove’s lawyer during discussions that took place between Cooper’s lawyer, Rove’s lawyer and Fitzgerald in the 24 hours before Rove let Cooper off the confidentiality hook. Otherwise, Luskin would never have allowed Rove to release Cooper from his confidentiality pledge.

I think if Fitzgerald has a target in sight it is Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and possibly other members of the White House Iraq Group. Of course, since Rove attended most of the Group’s weekly meetings, he may have some exposure there on a conspiracy charge - or on a false statement or perjury charge if he told investigators or the grand jury something different on an earlier occasion.

For a more strident lefty take, here’s a posting at Daily Kos that tortuously dissects a Walter Pincus article on what Rove knew and when he knew it:

Novak simply said that Plame allegedly “suggested” Wilson for the Niger investigation. That’s it. But it doesn’t say the White House knew that at the time; doesn’t say they found out later; doesn’t say they found out in the week prior to Novak’s column. Nothing. But Pincus’ source has a timeline. What Pincus’ source is saying is not merely relaying Plame’s status according to Novak’s column, but giving the additional information that “the White House had not paid attention to the 2002 trip” because of Plame’s known status at the time.

Why might that be important? Simply because, two days before Novak’s column was published, we have an administration official leaking subtle details of the Plame/Wilson/Niger/CIA connection that even Novak hadn’t written. That’s not consistent with the assertion by administration officials that they only “found out” Plame’s status from Novak’s column. This is someone citing knowledge of Plame’s CIA status inside the White House contemporaneous to the trip itself, and leaking that knowledge to Pincus on the 12th.

While Mr. Merritt’s take has a grasp of the significance of this Newsweek piece on Time reporter Matt Cooper’s source, the Kossak screed dances around the facts to arrive at a totally different conclusion.

What are the facts? Here’s the relevant passage from Michael Isikoff’s investigation:

In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson’s criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time’s editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine’s corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a “big warning” not to “get too far out on Wilson.” Rove told Cooper that Wilson’s trip had not been authorized by “DCIA”—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, “it was, KR said, wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.” Wilson’s wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: “not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … “

The two things to note are that Rove never used Plame’s name (useful legal parsing of language that will drive the moonbats batty) and that Rove was not disclosing classified information. The email, which Cooper could never have imagined in his worst nightmare becoming public knowledge, also cuts the legs from underneath the political scandal that Rove was trying to get revenge on liar Wilson by outing his wife as a CIA agent. It’s clear that Rove was warning Cooper off a story that was wrong, something journalists are usually grateful for because it keeps them from looking as idiotic as Dan Rather did last September.

Given that Joe Wilson has been totally discredited and even the substance of his charges proved wrong, one would have to ask the obvious question: What are we all getting so excited about?

Arianna Huffington fantasizes about conspiracy:

According to the players, the key to whether this story has real legs — and whether it will spell the end of Rove — is determining intent. And a key to that is whether there was a meeting at the White House where Rove and Scooter Libby discussed what to do with the information they had gotten from the State Department about Valerie Plame being Joe Wilson’s wife, and her involvement in his being sent on the Niger/yellowcake mission. If it can be proven that such a meeting occurred, then Rove will be in deep trouble — especially if it is established that Rove made three phone calls leaking the info about Plame and her CIA gig… one to Matt Cooper, one to Walter Pincus, and one to Robert Novak.

Ms. Huffington’s fantasy “meeting” where Rove and Libby plotted to out Plame would make a good movie script but since there isn’t one scintilla of evidence that such a meeting occurred, such a conspiracy will have to remain as another liberal wet dream. Conspiracy to committ a crime would be something both the media and the public could get their minds around, unlike the kind of language parsing and mind reading that would be involved in trying to pin something on Rove as it stands now.

And that’s the nub of the problem for the left and, in the end, for the MSM who will be driving this story. Nixon’s crimes were simple to understand. “Obstruction of justice” fits very nicely as a banner headline on the front page of a newspaper. And the one word scandal that the Clinton impeachment became - sex - was an easy sell for obvious reasons. But where’s the “hook” for this scandal? What does the media have to hang its hat on with a story involving the President’s Chief of Staff warning off reporters from a story from a lying, self-important bureaucrat whose wife was trying to help his career by exaggerating his qualifications for a trip to discern Saddam Hussien’s nuclear intentions?

The churning of the story in the Shadow Media has already started on both the right and left. And one of the things that I’m anxious to discover (from a purely academic point of view) is the power of the new media to affect the coverage given the scandal in the MSM. Since liberal talk radio is non-existent, the only real connection the left has to the larger megaphone of the MSM are mega-blogs like Daily Kos and Talkleft. Smaller lefty blogs have never been able to receive much of a hearing because of the linking policies of the larger lefty blogs which bestow such favors grudgingly, it at all. If the left half of the Shadow Media wants to drive this story, I would suggest a change in that policy. One of the strengths of the righty blogs is our ability to saturate the sphere because of linking policies by blogs both large and small that guarantee the widest possible exposure of opinion and news in an extraordinarily short period of time. And in the 24 hour news cycle of cable news, this has proven to be useful in driving the debate.

Of course, it’s always easier to be on the attack in politics. And given the facts of this case versus the spin, it should be interesting to see where we are a week from now.

UPDATE

And now…from the right:

Powerline covers the legal issues with their usual clarity and thoroughness.

Dafydd ab Hugh guest blogging while the Captain enjoys his DC vacation has an excellent political-legal analysis that’s truly a must read.

Michelle Malkin has a great roundup with plenty of links covering all the angles.

Lorie Byrd skewers media coverage of the scandal to date.

Betsy Newmark offers some interesting opinions and prescient analysis.

And Hugh Hewitt gives the story a little perspective. The military has just recovered the body of the last Navy SEAL missing in Afghanistan:

This incredible sacrifice, coupled with the carnage in London and in Baghdad, provides the backdrop for my comments on the media frenzy surrounding what Karl Rove said or didn’t say to a reporter about the cheeseball’s wife.

Amen to that.

UPDATE II

Tom Maguire has been all over this story for weeks. Read his entire piece to gain some much needed political perspective on the motivations of both sides.

One thing Maguire highlights is the timeline being used by the left to try and prove Rove and Novak may have been in cahoots in outing Plame. Tom’s own timeline is a useful debunking tool as well as proof that Time’s Matt Cooper may in fact be shielding other journalists as his source for the leak.

Basil is having lunch. See what’s on the menu.

E.J. Dionne is a weeny.

Not very grown up of me, I’ll admit. But what else do you call someone who, when it comes to elections and governance, decides to make up the rules as we go along instead of adhering to to time honored traditions and history?

Should a temporary majority of 50.7 percent have control over the entire United States government? Should 49.3 percent of Americans have no influence over the nation’s trajectory for the next generation?

Like a spoiled brat of a child, Dionne is throwing a tantrum because the Republicans are seeking to (gasp!) control all three branches of government by putting a conservative or two on the Supreme Court. Evidently, Mr. Dionne has a novel view about elections: The Republican majority isn’t large enough to justify governing the country.

Many Republicans are already saying that since Bush won the last election and since Republicans control the Senate, the president’s choice should be confirmed with dispatch. But as former judge Robert Bork wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Supreme Court “is the most powerful branch of government in domestic policy.” Today’s Republican majority, based on Bush’s 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004, has no inherent right to exercise near-total control over that “most powerful branch.”

Of course, Mr. Dionne’s thesis begs the question - um, just how large a majority would justify Republican governance? Since Mr. Dionne doesn’t answer the question, I’ll do it for him.

Exactly one more vote than your guy got.

We call this democracy. If your guy had gotten one more vote than our guy, then he would be the one sitting in the Big Chair making the selection that would have a minority party controlling two thirds of the federal government.

See how this thing cuts both ways?

Of course, if the situation were reversed I doubt whether we’d hear you caterwauling about “consultation” or other Democratic code words for obstructionism. Then again, if the confirmation shoe was on your foot, I have no doubt that you would use these numbers to justify nominating the most far left judges imaginable:

Consider that since 1992 the Republican presidential vote has averaged only 44 percent and the vote for Republican House candidates has averaged roughly 48 percent. In 2004, with large margins in some of the largest states, Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate received nearly 5 million more votes than their Republican opponents.

Those numbers don’t change the fact that the GOP controls both the White House and the Senate. But they do suggest that the Republicans owe a decent respect to the opinions of the Democratic minority and have no mandate for pushing the court far to the right. Yes, this is a “political” assertion. But debates over Supreme Court nominations have been political throughout our history.

Mr. Dionne now refuses to reveal what his threshold for “mandate” would be. I recall following President Reagan’s electoral slaughter of Walter Mondale in the 1984 election, Democrats refused to acknowledge any mandate for the winner of 58% of ballots cast and 525 out of 538 electoral votes. After all (their logic went) , if one were to include every American eligible to vote (along with every dog, cat, and bunny rabbit) Mr. Reagan received less than 50% support of the American people. This was a time when Americans still took the Democratic party seriously unlike today where Democrats have become the punchline to a national joke.

A “mandate” in a democracy is when your guy gets one more vote than the other guy. This is based on the simple idea that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. If one more of the governed gives their consent to be governed by the winner of an election, that’s as big a mandate as any landslide in political history. Any other formulation will not work. To try and make up new rules simply because your ideas and candidates have been rejected by 50% plus 1 of the electorate may be emotionally necessary but hardly a sound basis to conduct the business of the republic.

Yes, the minority has “rights” - or rather the minority view is “protected.” This protection takes the form of procedural rules like the filibuster in the Senate and (formerly) a strong federalist bent that gave certain powers to states that didn’t vote for the majority candidate. I find it interesting that Democrats are talking about “checks and balances” in the Senate as “Constitutional.” As every 12th grader in my day had to know before they could graduate high school, the “checks and balances” in the Constitution referred to the 3 separate but equal branches of government and had no relationship whatsoever to the transient nature of political power in one branch or another. This seems to have escaped the attention of the clueless Mr. Dionne.

Finally, Mr. Dionne advocates the Borking of any nominee as a last resort to keep the dastardly Republicans from seizing control of the government altogether and exercising the power granted them by the electorate in the last election:

Those who say that politics, philosophy and “issues” shouldn’t be part of the confirmation argument typically bemoan the prospect of a mean and dirty fight. But if the only legitimate way to stop a nominee is to discover or allege some personal shortcoming, all the incentives are in favor of nasty ad hominem attacks. If senators disagree profoundly with the philosophy of a nominee who happens to be a perfectly decent human being, isn’t it far better that they wage their battle openly on philosophical and political grounds? Why force them to dig up bad stuff on a good person? Paradoxically, denying that politics matter in confirmation battles makes for uglier politics.

A “legitimate” way to stop a nominee is to “discover or allege” (lie) some personal foible? One would hope that shooting the nominee would at least fall under Mr. Dionne’s definition of “illegitimate” because throwing crap against the wall to see if anything sticks is a helluva way to fight the nomination of a Justice to the United States Supreme Court. This tactic is not only beneath contempt, it reveals how desperately the Democrats and their gaggle of interest groups need to stop a conservative from being confirmed. The apocalyptic rhetoric of NOW, ANSWER, and the alphabet soup of special pleaders who call the Democratic party home makes a little more sense when placed in the context that it would be perfectly legitimate to make something up about a nominee in order to defeat them.

Mr. Dionne has given us fair warning that the coming fight over the next Justice to the United States Supreme Court is going to be a bloody one. And it also appears that the Democrats may be perfectly willing to filibuster any nominee who would reflect even a moderate conservative philosophy - especially if that philosophy was disagreeable to the interest groups whose hold on the elected officials in that party is now total and complete.

UPDATE

Polipundit also takes Dionne to task for his curious ideas regarding democracy:

So I guess we should all just forget about that election thingy. I’m sure Dionne would say the same thing if Kerry had won, and if Democrats - rather than Republicans - had gained four seats in the US Senate in 2004. Right? Right?

Not to belabor the point, but Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff also sees the hypocrisy dripping from this aricle. It says something revealing about the MSM that liberal columnists still feel secure enough that they can write this drivel with impunity.

UPDATE 7/12

David Limbaugh makes many of the same points that I do in his royal reaming of Mr. Dionne and adds this:

The answers to E.J.’s questions are these: No, a relatively narrow majority (nor an overwhelming majority, for that matter) does not have an inherent right to exercise near-total control over the “entire U.S. government” or “that ‘most powerful branch.’” It is entitled to precisely that amount of influence it is able to muster under the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the president is entitled to appoint judges, and the Senate has the advice and consent power.

Senators of the majority party are not required to push their agenda with only 50.7 percent intensity. It’s an adversary system — they may promote their views with 100 percent of their energy, and it is up to the minority party to advocate their dissenting views.

Elections have consequences E.J. - except when Republicans win, eh?

I swear to God I ought to go into the palm reading business.

At about 4:30 this morning, as the news was first trickling in about the terror bombings in London, I predicted that the left would find some way to blame Bush and accuse him in the process of trying to make political hay out of the tragedy.

Sure enough, it wasn’t long before Kos, the DU moonbats, and lefty bloggers all over the sphere were jumping all over this story bashing the President unmercifully and offering the attack as proof that the President’s war on terror is a failure.

From Daily Kos:

One has to wonder if we were not physically encroaching in the middle east whether these travesties would be taking place against us. Certainly they would be less common.

If only Bush and Blair would have allowed the inspectors to complete their job this barbaric act today would probably never have happened…

Do you believe that Karl Rove isn’t plotting how to spin the London attacks at this very moment?

I agree we should mourn the dead from today’s attack. Perhaps many of us are cynical but it comes from experience of seeing how our so called leaders behaved after previous attacks

Democratic Underground:

Yes, Blair, “barbaric,” just like the daisy-cutter bombs you and yours dropped on innocent people in Iraq. As Richard Clark had predicted, your preemptive attack on Iraq–and your little buddy’s, the Chimp–has brought more terror on the world, not less. Wake the hell up. You brought this on all of us.

This is the post I looked for to make sure someone else pointed it out. Thank you. We can never make ourselves safe by killing people elsewhere and then expecting ourselves to be immune.

Thank you for remembering Crazy Reason #7 for killing brown people who live over oil in the ground

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

What can you say to such idiocy?

And remember George Galloway? He’s the British MP up to his neck in the Oil for Food scandal who came over and testified before the Senate committee? Here’s his reaction to today’s bombing:

We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings.”

Talk about predictable.

The only question I have for you, oh gentle readers, can you imagine what the reaction from these moonbats would have been if the bombs went off here?

Oh the moonbats would have been barking then.

Okay, I admit it. I’m a grump.

These days, it’s very difficult to see the glass as anything except half empty when it comes to looking toward America’s future.

We are beset by critics all over the world who seek to undermine our interests and, more importantly, our safety. Under the guise of “Internationalism,” countries like France, Germany, China, Russia, and a host of others seek to advance their own interests by claiming that when we look out for our welfare instead of theirs, we are being “arrogant” or “unilateral.” In short, because we refuse to do what these enlightened leaders of the international community say, we are ignorant and backward.

We are beset by critics at home who, quite simply, have lost it. While the left in America has always been unbalanced, they were tolerated because their fantasies and idiocies weren’t really a threat to our safety - kind of like a crazy uncle who visits every Christmas and is okay as long as you keep him away from the liquor cabinet. All this changed following 9/11. At a time when we can least afford the unserious and intellectually vapid pronouncements and activities of the moonbats, we are treated to the most astonishing disconnect from reality imaginable. Blind to the dangers posed by our murderous and implacable enemies, the left is attempting to speed us toward annihilation like a lunatic with a match running toward a gasoline dump.

We are afflicted with a judiciary at all levels that slowly and surely undercuts our traditions, our history, and even the constitution itself in an ever expanding effort to take decisions away from the people’s representatives and place it in their own, unelected hands.

We have are cursed with an epidemic of ignorant politicians - both right and left - whose outrageous statements on politics, religion, foreign policy, the war, and each other has polarized the entire body politic to the point where civil discourse is impossible.

We are besieged by a media whose bias, obvious to everyone but themselves, has made the President of the United States and the Iraq War the target of one-sided, slanted coverage so profoundly misleading that their standing with the American people has dropped to an all time low.

We are infested with denizens of a “New Media” - both right and left - many of whom march in lockstep like obedient little drones echoing the rumors, lies, and spin of the ideological lickspittles who are beholden to one party or another.

We are cursed with a culture whose toxicity and nauseating noxiousness has become the bane of western civilization.

Other than this, things are just peachy.

On this 4th of July, when there is an organized effort to burn as many American flags as possible, when there are American citizens openly cheering on the Iraqi insurgents who are killing our soldiers on the field of battle, when the rhetoric of the left soars to ever more fantastic heights of unreality and fantasy, it’s very difficult to be optimistic about the future.

And the President, now burdened with the coming fight over his nominee for the Supreme Court, will be unable to devote the time and effort necessary to get the American people behind him and his war polices that as I write this, are being undermined by both the MSM and his political opponents to the point where it may become impossible to sustain them.

Am I overstating our problems? Not by much, I think.

So this 4th of July, I’m not even going to think about the present. I’m going to enjoy a couple of the very few patriotic programs on TV (one would think it was Easter Sunday so barren of holiday programming is the schedule) - most notably the PBS series Liberty! The American Revolution and the movie starring James Cagney as George M. Cohan entitled Yankee Doodle Dandy and then top off the day with burgers, brats, and dogs on the grill with potato salad.

As long as I don’t read the news or visit the Democratic Underground, I’ll be able to enjoy my traditional 4th of July repast without getting indigestion. And maybe by watching how that extraordinary group of men defied the most fantastic odds to defeat the most powerful nation on earth to win their independence, I’ll feel a little more optimistic about the future.

Anyway, it couldn’t hurt.

The President once again confounded his critics and rose to the occasion last night to deliver an informative and at times inspiring speech in defense of his war policies.

It’s nothing less than what we’ve come to expect. Bush masterfully wove the 9/11 thread into the Iraq thread, something that always drives his critics through the roof because they know Bush’s support jumps whenever he brings up that horrible day in relation to the Iraq war. It’s something he’s gotten away from in the months since the election and it was well past time for him to draw the pictures and connect the dots once again.

In short, it was a great speech, one of his best. But now I’d like to see the President give the next speech, the speech that will cover what everyone is talking about and thinking about.

Let’s call it “The Torture Speech.”

I can understand that the speech last night was not the time nor the place to bring up prisoner abuse. But it’s an issue that the President himself must start addressing. Assurances from Rumsfeld and the Pentagon brass just isn’t good enough. Simply saying that the detainees are being treated well isn’t good enough. Ignoring an issue that the rest of the world is concerned about, that the Arab press is skewering us with and undermining our war effort, and that even many of the President’s strongest supporters are talking about isn’t good enough.

The issue demands Presidential leadership. It cries out for Presidential reassurances. And it requires an executive department accounting, something that only the President can give.

There are investigations, reviews, prosecutions, court martials, and allegations from detainees and their lawyers that are all out there, dragging down our image abroad and sapping the will to fight of our people at home. Only the President, using the power and prestige of his office, can sort out the wheat from the chaff, the lies from the truth, in order to assure the world and the American people that everything is being done to correct a situation where the vast majority of the world believes the United States military is systematically and deliberately committing heinous war crimes.

Clearly there has been abuse, perhaps even widespread mistreatment of prisoners. Just as certainly, there have been isolated incidents of torture and even murder. For the President to remain silent and not get out front of this issue and lead may be politically the right thing to do but it is morally wrong. If the President were to acknowledge wrongdoing - with a specificity that’s been lacking up to this point - as well as outline the remedies already in place and reiterate American policy toward detainees, it would go a long way toward reassuring the American people and silencing some of the arguments of his critics.

Yes, his critics will still use the issue as a political club. But some of the power of their arguments will dissipate in the face of the President’s resolve to not only fix the situation as it currently stands but also work to see that such practices do not happen in the future. In short, he could cutoff the legs from underneath his critics arguments and diffuse a lot of unnecessary criticism. And, it would reassure his supporters who have been wavering over these last several weeks.

Finally, some resolution to the legal limbo many of the detainees are held in must occur. The President must first acknowledge this problem, something the Justice Department and the Pentagon have been unwilling to do up to this point. Then, common decency and the rule of law demand that we solve this issue. Many of the terrorists have been held for more than 3 years without a resolution of their status. “Enemy combatants” was an easy label to hang on the terrorists while the fighting was going on but now it’s time to find some designation more permanent. Whether it will be Congress who decides or the Pentagon or even the Department of Justice is of little consequence as long as the determination is made to solve this problem soon. And only the President should be making these kinds of decisions.

I have no doubt this will be the hardest speech the President will ever have to make. But it’s a speech that must be given. Until he does, all the hard work, all the sacrifices by our men and women and their families will be for naught. The fact is, this issue is a monkey wrench that’s mucking up the machinery of war. Only the President can convince the world that the United States really is serious about this issue and is doing its best to solve it.

The reputation of the United States and our armed forces demand no less.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

The New York Times is concerned.

This is usually a good sign. The Times doesn’t get concerned unless conservatives are doing something they don’t much like. In this case, the Times is concerned that the “version” of 9/11 that will be featured at the Ground Zero Memorial won’t remember the fallen and their “rich, complex and politically and culturally divided” lives. Instead, it will be a remembrance of America’s tragedy and the Americans who died there.

This just simply won’t do. Where’s the cultural sensitivity? Where’s the balance? What, no Abu Ghraib?

Gov. George Pataki’s decision to side with increasingly vocal critics of the cultural plans for the World Trade Center site is not surprising, but it is alarming. The governor has been deeply and rightly sensitive to the concerns of the families of the victims of 9/11. Like all of us, he honors their loss and their grief. But by bowing to some of the survivors’ growing hostility to any version of 9/11 except their own, Mr. Pataki is doing a disservice to history and to the very idea of freedom.

The protesters have objected to the proposed International Freedom Center, which they fear might someday sponsor discussions that cast America in a negative light, and to the Drawing Center, one of the cultural institutions invited to move to ground zero, which has displayed art that appears to criticize the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

Is there an “alternate version” of 9/11 of which I’m unaware? Isn’t that the day when 19 Islamic terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and murdered nearly 3000 Americans? In the universe inhabited by the New York Times, the answer is no:

What those lives stand for now is American freedom, in its full implication and all its contradictions. That is what has gone missing in the governor’s remarks, in which he demanded that the cultural organizations promise never to display art that might “denigrate” the victims of 9/11 or America in general. Mr. Pataki has accepted at face value the tenor of the protests at ground zero, which are, frankly, a call for censorship, indeed for censorship in advance - for political oversight of an artistic process that has only begun to evolve.

It is no contradiction to hope that ground zero will become a place that commemorates death and reaffirms life at the same time. But it will be the worst of bad beginnings to turn it into a place where only grief is acceptable, where the vital impulses represented by the arts are handcuffed in the name of freedom.

Asking that people respect the memories of the dead by not turning the Memorial into a political statement that would denigrate America would, just about anywhere else in this country, be a no brainer. Evidently, it’s too much to ask of the New York Times. And by raising the usual leftist canards regarding “censorship” (how about common decency?) whenever someone objects to anything a liberal does, is par for the course.

By supporting the idea that highlighting America’s sins at a memorial to honor the butchering of innocents, the New York Times proves that it isn’t an “alternate version” of events that’s at stake here - it’s the “alternate universe” the Times inhabits when it comes to anything that smacks of honoring America.

Well, it’s about time.

Karl Rove has taken off the gloves and scored some pretty potent left hooks landing them directly on the chin of the President’s tormentors. Invoking 9/11, Rove slammed liberals for their approach to the war on terror:

“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, “I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.”

The Democrat reaction was quick and predictable: How dare he try and divide the country. That’s our job!

Told of Mr. Rove’s remarks, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, replied: “In New York, where everyone unified after 9/11, the last thing we need is somebody who seeks to divide us for political purposes

Your absolutely right, Chuck. How can we forget Democrat clarion calls for unity with the Nazis, er…Republicans. And your unwavering support for our President Adolph, er…George Bush. And let’s not forget your tearful effort to bring all people of faith including members of the Theocracy, er…Christian religion together.

All of this talk of unity by the Democrats seems to have slipped my mind.

At any rate, Nancy Pelosi won’t take this lying down:

“The president wanted to go to Iraq in the worst possible way and he did,” Pelosi said. “The president is on the ropes.”

Um, begging your pardon Madame minority leader but in a war, isn’t it customary to like, you know, want to have the enemy on the ropes rather than our guy? Perhaps you’re having a slight enemy identification problem? Let me help you. You’re supposed to be on the side of the United States. Unaccustomed as you are to such a position, let me offer you some free advice. We’re the ones who didn’t fly airliners into skyscrapers killing 3000 innocent people.

And our maybe soon to be first female candidate for President Hillary Clinton, threw her burgeoning weight around on the issue as well. (Note to Hill: The seat of your pants appears to be getting a little tight. Try polyester):

“I would hope that you and other members of the administration would immediately repudiate such an insulting comment from a high-ranking official in the president’s inner circle,” Clinton said.

The question is repudiate what? As I write this, dozens of rightwing bloggers are combing the statements made by prominent liberals after 9/11. I guarantee you that they’re going to find plenty of ammunition. In the meantime, Hill…chill. After all, Rove used to the term “liberal” to describe those who wanted to offer therapy to terrorists. And we all know that doesn’t include you, right? You’re a centrist so you’ve got nothing to worry about.

As a matter of fact, Rove never said the word “Democrats” as far as I can tell. So unless the Democrats want to change the name of their party (or allow only liberals to be part of it) they really don’t have anything to complain about, do they? That is, unless they already are liberal and don’t want anyone to know. In which case, Rove just initiated the most important “outing” of a political party in history.

UPDATE

I love it when I’m right.

As I predicted above, righty bloggers have been scouring the net and have struck gold. Here are just a few of the dozens of statements by prominent liberals following September 11 that prove Karl Rove was indeed correct:

John Hawkins:

“In a situation like this, of course you identify with everyone who’s suffering. [But we must also think about] the terrorists who are creating such horrible future lives for themselves because of the negativity of this karma. It’s all of our jobs to keep our minds as expansive as possible. If you can see [the terrorists] as a relative who’s dangerously sick and we have to give them medicine, and the medicine is love and compassion. There’s nothing better.” — Richard Gere

“Melt their weapons, melt their hearts, melt their anger with love.” — Shirley MacLaine on her anti-terrorism policy.

Matt Margolis:

Liberal donor George Soros said that he felt we should have responded to 9/11 as if it were a crime, “The terrorist attack on the United States could have been treated as a crime against humanity rather than an act of war. Treating it as a crime would have been more appropriate.” Soros also declared the war on terror was unwinnable:

“We, the undersigned, citizens and residents of the United States of America and of countries around the world, appeal to the President of The United States, George W. Bush; …and to all leaders internationally to use moderation and restraint in responding to the recent terrorist attacks against the United States.”

Michelle Malkin:

Flashback, December 2002: Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) exhibits the let’s-understand-why they-hate-us approach to fighting terrorism:

We’ve got to ask, why is this man [Osama bin Laden] so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries … that are riddled with poverty? He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day care facilities, building health care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. We haven’t done that. How would they look at us today if we had been there helping them with some of that rather than just being the people who are going to bomb in Iraq and go to Afghanistan?

Ed Morrissey:

Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), 10/1/01, Roll Call: “I truly believe if we had a Department of Peace, we could have seen [9/11] coming.”
Al Sharpton, 12/1/02, New York Times, on the 9/11 attacks: “America is beginning to reap what it has sown.”

Rep. Marcy Kaptur, 3/1/2003, Toledo Blade: “One could say that Osama bin Laden and these non-nation-state fighters with religious purpose are very similar to those kind of atypical revolutionaries that helped cast off the British crown.”

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

With support for the War in Iraq among the American people plummeting faster than the Cub’s chances for post season play, there’s only one person who can change the political dynamic of the situation and buck up the spirits of his supporters and once again flummox the designs of his opponents.

George Bush has been absent from the front for too long. His digressions into domestic politics have shifted his focus from Iraq with nearly disastrous consequences for our efforts there. His press conferences over the last few months have been exercises in little more than soft core salesmanship. There’s been a lack of focus from the White House resulting in the perception that our Iraq policy is adrift. Our men are dying, the terrorist insurgency is slaughtering the Iraqi people with scores dying every day. The Iraqi government is quibbling. And worst of all, because of a lack of leadership, the American people are beginning to lose heart.

Part of this loss of faith by the people is the result of the constant drumbeat of negativity from the MSM and the President’s political opponents. It’s gotten so bad that some of the less committed supporters of the President in Congress have begun to run for cover by supporting a Democratic effort to tell the enemy when we plan to stop killing them.

And it doesn’t help when the Vice President says that the insurgency is in its “last throes” only to be contradicted by the top Commander in the Persian Gulf.

All of this should be a wake-up call for the President and his advisor’s. Instead, a big PR push is planned over the next week or so culminating in what apparently is going to be a prime time address on Iraq from the Oval Office.

This is not the way to rekindle the war spirit in the American people. It is shallow. And it’s a pointless exercise in politicking when we need more, much more. It’s time to get back to work on Iraq.

It’s time to get off the stump and get back in the saddle. It’s time to face down the demons of Viet Nam that are gleefully being conjured up by your political foes and squash the idea of any kind of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. And it’s time to start kicking your opponents in the teeth for their obstinacy, their opposition, their obstructionism, and their ever escalating flights of rhetorical baloney comparing you, the Republican party, and anyone who supports you with Nazis.

Austin Bay has some excellent suggestions:

But our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial page of the New York Times, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C.

It seems America wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that Sept. 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the U.S. political class?

The Bush administration has yet to ask the American people — correction, has yet to demand of the American people — the sustained, shared sacrifice it takes to win this long, intricate war of bullets, ballots and bricks.

Bullets go bang, and even CBS understands bullets. Ballots make an impression — in terms of this war’s battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II’s D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks — the building of Iraq, Afghanistan and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought — that’s a delicate and decades-long challenge.

Given the vicious enemy we face, five years, perhaps 15 years from now, occasional bullets and bombs will disrupt the political and economic building. This is the Bush administration’s biggest strategic mistake: failure to tap the American willingness produced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

We’ve taken the President to task for this failure in the past. His inability to ask - or as Mr. Bay so rightly puts it - demand sacrifices of the American people is perhaps his biggest political error in this entire conflict. The American people have nothing invested in this war. We’re suffering a disconnect from the battlefield that was never a problem in World War II. Of course, most people at home during that war had a personal stake in the outcome what with family members in harms way. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way the war played out in the everyday lives of people. Rationing, war bonds, scrap metal drives, victory gardens, all became part of the American landscape, imprinting the war on people’s consciousness and uniting the country in such a way so that when setbacks and crisis occurred, there was a sense that we were facing our problems together.

Today, flickering images of smoldering cars, dead bodies, horribly wounded people, and grim body counts are watched in the privacy of our homes. Disconnected as we are from our neighbors and even our families, we struggle to deal with feelings of helplessness and sorrow as we watch the carnage night after night on television. It has caused many loyal and patriotic Americans to question why we’re in Iraq. What good is being done there? And most importantly, is it worth the lives of our best and brightest young people?

Only by leveling with the American people about who we’re fighting and what we’re fighting for can the dynamic be changed.

NRO’s Barbara Lerner has some suggestions:

I agree that the administration is at fault, but for an entirely different reason: because Cowboy George morphed into Cautious George. Cowboy George was a bold leader, unafraid to take the tough offensive actions we must take to win this war. He led us in the first two years after 9/11, and Americans rallied behind him in numbers so overwhelming they made “soft America” all but invisible. But after our conquest of the Iraqi military in 2003, Cautious George replaced Cowboy George. Cautious George is forcing us to fight with one hand tied behind our back by pretending we are fighting against one country only. In fact, we are fighting a regional war in Iraq, and have been since day one. It’s past time for America to acknowledge that fact and act on it. Time to make all the Middle Eastern despots who are pouring money, men, and arms into the battle in Iraq stop.

Because the president has not done this, most Americans think we are fighting only against Iraqis — local people, dependent on local resources. In that light, our inability to stem the daily toll of bombs and blood looks like evidence that most Iraqis support terror. Americans don’t see that Iraq as worth fighting for, or that kind of war as winnable. Other polls suggest Americans worry, increasingly, that Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia also threaten our security. They fear that by expending so much blood and treasure on Iraq alone, we may make ourselves more vulnerable to attacks from others.

Iraq is a difficult place, but this all-dark picture is false as well as dispiriting. Inadvertently, the Bush administration has made it look believable by downplaying the big role that foreign governments and their terrorist proxies play in Iraq. Administration spokesmen rarely pointed to the support — diplomatic as well as military — Iraq’s Sunni Baathist terrorists get from Sunni tyrants abroad, and they kept insisting that foreign jihadists are only a minority of the fighters we face. But foreign support is a fact, and harping on the relatively small number of foreign jihadists in Iraq at any one time misses the point. Foreign jihadists are responsible for almost all suicide bombings, and suicide bombings cause a disproportionate share of American and Iraqi casualties. Worse, because foreign jihadists come from all the Arab states as well as Iran, there is an endless supply of them. If we confine ourselves to hunting them down, one by one, only after they infiltrate Iraq, we will be there forever. Far better to act forcefully to stop the infiltration, and do it in a way that sends a message to all terror-succoring states: The free ride is over. The price for continuing to aid and abet the war against us and against a free Iraq has gone up.

Would this mean expanding the war? It would mean making it crystal clear to Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that continued infiltration of bloodthirsty jihadists from their countries will carry with it a graduated series of consequences, the worst of which would be the despotic Sheiks, Mullahs, and autocrats sharing a jail cell with Saddam Hussein. If you said it, they’d believe it.

For the folks back home, we need to be reminded constantly of what our ultimate goal is in Iraq. Don’t be afraid to raise the ghosts of 9/11 to justify your policy. First of all, it would drive your opponents crazy and make them say things that would have them looking like apologists for the terrorists. And it would also bring into stark relief the unthinkable alternative of getting out of Iraq before the job was done.

It’s time to step up and get out front of this issue before your opponents preempt your policy and start substituting their own agenda. That can’t happen. If it does, yours will have been a failed presidency. And you’ll only have yourself to blame.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

There’s something pathetically childlike about the Bush-hating, anti-war left these days. It’s not just Dick Durbin’s big mouth or John Conyers’ grandstanding about the Downing Street Minutes. The left has been galvanized by poll numbers showing the American people exhibiting war weariness. They’ve been positively giddy about the continued success of the terrorists in killing scores of Iraqis and dozens of our soldiers. Even the autopsy report on Terri Schiavo gave them cause to dance a jig in celebration, gloating over the fact that the poor woman was indeed in a persistent vegetative state, thus allowing them to stick it the “fundies” who they hate almost as much as Bush.

In short, the spate of “good news” for the left over the last couple of weeks has them exhibiting all the symptoms of a child’s anticipation of an approaching birthday or an upcoming Christmas Day. One can almost imagine them clapping their hands together in glee as they watched Senator Hagel call the Administration”completely disconnected from reality” about Iraq or other Republicans criticize Administration war policy.

Am I exaggerating? Read this from The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. It’s from an email she received from an activist friend:

“I was in Washington yesterday at the rally and at the Conyers hearings. And since I laid a heavy statement on you last week, I just wanted to make a correction. It’s finally over. My despair is over. Something has happened these last ten days that has revived the antiwar issue. It has to do with public opinion polls and casualties and Republicans like Walter Jones and more Democrats standing up. I won’t say how optimistic I am. But something is coming together–you can feel it.”

You can feel it.

Note the celebration of “casualties.” There’s more:

In the House, the International Relations Committee last week voted overwhelmingly, 32 to 9, to call on the White House to develop and submit a plan to Congress for establishing a stable government and military in Iraq that would “permit a decreased US presence” in the country. Congresswomen Maxine Waters (D/CA)–along with 41 Congressional progressives, including Woolsey, John Lewis, Charles Rangel, Jim McGovern, Rush Holt, Marcy Kaptur and Jan Schakowsky–has just formed the “Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus.” Its sole purpose, Waters says, “is to be the main agitators in the movement to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.” And Rep John Conyers’ impassioned efforts to bring attention to the Downing Street Memo–on Thursday he held hearings on Capitol Hill and then delivered to the White House letters that contained the names of more than 560,000 Americans demanding answers to questions raised by the British memo–has reenergized and refocused opposition to the war.

All in all, the left thinks that they’ve got the Bush Administration on the run. But in all the celebratory encomiums and congratulatory backslapping, there’s not a word about what they believe the enemy thinks about their campaign to deliberately undermine the war effort. This is no accident as there has been a “word deficit” on the part of the left since the War on Terror and especially since the war in Iraq began.

The word “enemy” has been removed from their lexicon - except as it relates to the President and their political foes on the right. Our enemies are called “insurgents.” They’re called “rebels.” They’re referred to as “the opposition.” Some on the far left have gone so far as to call them “freedom fighters.” Even al Qaeda fighters in our custody are called “detainees.” But to call them “the enemy” opens an intellectual chasm beneath their feet that the left simply cannot look into without blanching in horror.

If the left were to acknowledge that we’re actually fighting an enemy, their entire rationale for opposing the war would disappear. As long as they don’t acknowledge there’s an enemy, the war is “unnecessary.” But if they were to concede that there are people who want to kill our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, they would have to allow that there’s a possibility that a military presence in those countries is essential. After all, the whole point of having a military in the first place is to protect us from, and wherever possible kill our enemies.

Thus, the left’s fascination with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and civilian casualties. By concentrating on our sins - both real and imagined - they can take the focus off what the enemy is doing both to our troops and the innocent civilians who are increasingly being targeted for death and place it on an impossibly high moral plane that if we were to live up to, our chances of winning in the end would be substantially diminished. Hence, their most recent argument that it’s perfectly alright to refer to American soldiers and the American government as Nazis because we’re not “different enough” from Hitler’s thugs. This kind of sophistry is impossible to answer. Since they never define what “enough” means, the left can paint the military with the broadest brush possible. If an interrogator drops a Koran on the floor, we’re no better than the Nazis. If we turn up the air conditioning, Pol Pot couldn’t have done worse.

It’s madness.

The remarks of Senator Durbin and other Democrats comparing the United States to Nazi Germany take on a whole new meaning when placed in this context. Since war needs an enemy, the left has decided that our foe should not be the murderous beheaders in Iraq or the piteous killers of innocents in al Quadea. They’ve decided that the enemy is us - our government, our military, and their fellow citizens who are opposing them.

Also, by agitating for trials in American courts for the terrorists being held in Guantanamo and elsewhere, granting them equal rights under the 5th Amendment and giving them all the constitutional protection that an American citizen would receive, the left furthers its efforts to destroy any rationale for military action. After all, do you go to war against wife beaters or muggers? The very thought of keeping these dangerous men locked up for the rest of their lives draws howls of rage and more Nazi similes.

Thankfully, this new found confidence of the left won’t last very long. The Iraqi army appears to be taking a more aggressive role in combat operations. And by the end of the summer, the Iraqi Government should have a constitution that will be agreeable to all. And while the Administration continues to shoot itself in the foot occasionally there is one constant to this war that neither the left nor the right can deny is true; the awesome performance of the young men and women in uniform who continue to do their jobs despite the inconstancy of some of their supporters and the outright hostility of their foes.