Waving The White Flag By Steve Tefft
stevetefft@yahoo.com
Mark Friday, Feb. 16 on your calendar.
Mark it with a black, funereal border, because Friday, Feb. 16 was the day the radical, anti-war Left completed its takeover of the national Democratic party. On that day, the House of Representatives approved a resolution opposing President Bush’s infusion of 21,000 troops to Baghdad.
Of the 233 Democrats in the House, 229 voted for the resolution. Put another way, 98 percent of House Democrats who claim to care most for the country’s best interests voted for something that can have only two practical effects in Iraq: [a] to thoroughly discourage our troops who have been winning every battle they fought, and [b] to thoroughly encourage our enemies, who surely measure America’s loss of nerve not by the week or day, but by the hour. (By comparison, 17 Republicans – or 8 percent of their caucus – voted for the resolution.)
It may have been the single most disgusting, craven act either house of Congress has taken in my lifetime. It is stunning to see so many Americans apparently eager to embrace defeat. But they “support the troops,” right?
As a conservative who usually supports Republicans, I could be expected to welcome the Democrats’ leftward lurch as an act of political suicide that might, in time, benefit my “side” of the aisle. But sometimes, country comes before party … and this is one of those times. We cannot win this war without a full commitment from both parties. We need Democrats in the mold of John F. Kennedy, whose inaugural address promised that America would “ … pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
We need Democrats like Harry Truman, or Henry (Scoop) Jackson, or Sam Nunn … all of whom knew that country came before party; that defense of our interests sometimes required the lowering of partisan blinders for the good of all.
Instead, we are stuck with Democrats like New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who promises an agenda of “ … resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment … just like in the days of Vietnam.” Or Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha, who has reportedly hatched – along with the radical leftists of MoveOn.Org – a so-called “slow bleed” strategy of erecting legislative roadblocks, one after another – akin to restrictive, concentric circles – that would dissipate the ability of President Bush (who is still Commander in Chief, by the way) to take decisive action, thereby forcing him to withdraw troops precipitously. If one didn’t know better, one might mistake Murtha’s plan for a captured enemy document.
The entire Democratic approach is riddled with inconsistency and outright hypocrisy. They spent days debating a resolution that is non-binding, yet don’t have the guts (not yet, at least) to take meaningful actions to de-fund a war they want ended.
Senate Democrats voted unanimously to approve the nomination of the mission’s new commander, Lieutenant Colonel David Petraeus, who will lead the very strategy they oppose. They’re bending themselves into pretzels to gain any possible political advantage while ensuring they draw no responsibility for their actions. And of course, through it all, they “support the troops.”
Maybe someday, the Democrats will come to their senses and realize that we are in a long-term war against radical Islam, and that the war cannot be won by ignoring it or wishing it away. Perhaps they will learn that their enemy is not George W. Bush, but the jihadists who would kill a Democrat just as gleefully as they would a Republican.
Hopefully, they will learn this before we are attacked again, and they will fashion a 21st century version of the heroic Democrats mentioned earlier. But as long as they remain fixated on defeating a political adversary rather than vanquishing a life-threatening foe, the prospects for such patriotic clarity are not good