Wednesday, January 19, 2005 |
01:59 - In all seriousness
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So in the space of a couple of days, we hear this:
The Democrats need to offer an alternative agenda over the next four years. It won't be enacted, so they can shoot for the moon. The hell with good policy, make proposals that sound great.
(Daily Kos, the Left's most illustrious and widely-read blogger—as well he ought to be, having been paid handsomely by the Dean campaign. Emitting a statement which, as M. Simon says, amounts to: "It is not about governing. It is about winning. With promises that cannot be kept.")
And then this:
If you care about restoring our credibility around the world and our credibility with our troops on the ground in Iraq, you’ve got to start by removing Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. That’s why I am joining Senator John Kerry and hundreds of thousands of Americans in adding my name to the johnkerry.com petition calling for Rumsfeld’s immediate removal from office.
I urge you to act without delay. We can’t afford any more auto-penned letters of condolences and shifting stories about what kind of armor we have to protect our troops.
(John Kerry, who almost became President of the United States, repeating tired, debunked accusations of the pettiest caliber—whining about "autopens" and only 810 out of 830 armored vehicles being sufficiently armored—under the guise of "protecting the troops". Oh, I'll bet he's just sick at heart.)
And then this:
Since our leaders don’t have the moral courage to speak out against the war in Iraq, Inauguration Day, Thursday, January 20th, 2005 is “Not One Damn Dime Day” in America.
On “Not One Damn Dime Day” those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.
During “Not One Damn Dime Day” please don’t spend money, and don’t use your credit card. Not one damn dime for gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases. Nor toll/cab/bus or train ride money exchanges. Not one damn dime for anything for 24 hours.
On “Not One Damn Dime Day,” please boycott Walmart, KMart and Target. Please don’t go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don’t buy any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter).
For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down. The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it.
“Not One Damn Dime Day” is to remind them, too, that they work for the people of the United States of America, not for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations and funnel cash into American politics.
“Not One Damn Dime Day” is about supporting the troops. The politicians put the troops in harm’s way. Now 1,200 brave young Americans and (some estimate) 100,000 Iraqis have died. The politicians owe our troops a plan — a way to come home.
(Support the troops—by destroying the economy! It's pure genius!)
And let's not forget this:
Boxer pointed out what she said were inconsistencies in Rice’s statements about the imminent threat of nuclear weapons in Iraq. “This is a pattern here of what I see from you,” Boxer said. “It’s very troubling. ... It’s hard for me to let go of this war because people are still dying.”
She said Rice has not acknowledged those deaths, has not laid out an exit strategy for Iraq and has been unwilling to admit mistakes — including going to war over weapons of mass destruction found later not to exist.
Rice insisted the war in Iraq was not launched solely over WMD. Deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, she said, welcomed terrorists, attacked his own neighbors and paid suicide bombers in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians.
But Boxer said the bill passed by Congress authorizing the war in Iraq was, “WMD, period.”
“Let’s not rewrite history, it’s too soon for that,” Boxer said.
And then of course there's my erstwhile Correspondent, who formulated long and detailed ripostes to my arguments that consisted of accusing the Republicans of reinstating the draft because the military "needs fresh blood", calling the invasion of Iraq an atrocity that overshadowed Hitler's invasion of Poland, expressing intense skepticism about the honesty of our stated motivation of spreading democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan (because these countries "don't want democracy"), and fabricating Ann Coulter quotes (mangled from glib but defensible real ones) purporting to be in favor of converting all non-Western nations to "Christianity and democracy" as well as the summary execution of "anyone disagreeing with Bush". I'm sure that deep down, somewhere in the pit of whatever his postmodern, pseudo-Native-American spirituality uses in place of a soul, he realizes that what he's saying is complete bullcrap that he has made up from whole cloth or absorbed from highly intellectually disreputable sources, and that he's resorting to such material because the actual facts simply don't back him up. But he can't just admit that, or won't. Somehow, he just knows he's right, and will believe thus all the more stubbornly the clearer it's made to him the logical fragility of the positions he espouses. Logic itself becomes the enemy, and must be defeated rather than embraced.
And it just goes on. The more stuff like this I hear, the more I think Tom DeLay had it right:
The Democrats’ problem is not a lack of patriotism. It’s a lack of seriousness.
They don’t hate their country, they just refuse to lead it.
I will never call the Democrat Party unpatriotic, but I will call their current leadership unfit to face the serious challenges of the 21st century.
I mean, what better response is there to all these bizarre displays than, simply, You can't possibly be serious, can you?
I don't know, honestly, what these people see as the foremost goal before them. It's not defending their country; otherwise they'd be proposing viable alternative ways to do so. It's not spreading freedom throughout the world; otherwise they wouldn't be acting horrified at the arrogance of our presuming to "foist" democracy on people who "don't want it" (like the Afghans who lined up for a whole day, sometimes avoiding bomb blasts and then getting back in line, just for the chance to vote). It's not making America stronger on the world stage, otherwise they wouldn't be doing their level best to neuter and marginalize American self-interest in favor of the UN, horrifyingly corrupt though it might be. It's not any of these things. And what else is there? Only warmed-over, hardly-relevant perennial favorites like race relations and the economy and health care. And meanwhile there's a huge hole in Lower Manhattan where there used to be two giant buildings full of many thousands of people. The best way to honor the victims' sacrifice, it seems to these illustrious voices of the Left, appears to be to render them invisible, to keep us from talking about them so that the right people can get back into power.
We need seriousness. It's the only single thing without which we cannot govern ourselves during this trying time in our history. We cannot give ourselves over to the agendas of those who won't even acknowledge that we're at war, who won't consider any plan that doesn't involve instant gratification, and who won't even go along with any proposal for anything that might possibly have been dreamed up by a Republican, just out of foot-stamping principle.
I'm not saying the Democrats are inherently a problem. We need them. We need a nation divided as evenly in two as possible, because any system in which a single party enjoys a clear and unassailable majority turns rapidly into a subversion of democracy. But I am saying that for the Democrats' own sake, they're going to have to learn all over again what it means to be serious about governing the country and the world. Otherwise, all the rest of us will be able to say is that we simply do not have the time for this crap.
We don't.
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