Loyal Opposition, or Traitors?
Tue December 16th, 2003 22:41 MSTThe Democrat presidential candidates (with the honorable exception of Joe Lieberman) are striving show that they will abandon Iraq at their first opportunity, as their party did previously in Vietnam and Mogadishu. Their intent is clear, even when they say “We will stay, but…”. They mistakenly believe that Bush is an illegitimate president, and thus his every action should be reversed, no matter the cost. At best they claim plans to turn the problem over to the heroes and fantastic country builders at the U.N. Furthermore, they offer no alternative method of dealing with Islamist terrorists, who have already killed thousands in our homeland and plan to kill millions more.
Bin Laden learned well the lessons of Vietnam, which is that anti-war Democrats are his best chance to win this war.
As written so eloquently by Democrat science fiction writer Orson Scott Card:
And the most vile part of this campaign against Mr. Bush is that the terrorist war is being used as a tool to try to defeat him–which means that if Mr. Bush does not win, we will certainly lose the war. Indeed, the anti-Bush campaign threatens to undermine our war effort, give encouragement to our enemies, and cost American lives during the long year of campaigning that lies ahead of us.Osama bin Laden’s military strategy is: If you make a war cost enough, Americans will give up and go home. Now, bin Laden isn’t actually all that bright; his campaign to make us go home is in fact what brought us into Afghanistan and Iraq. But he’s still telling his followers: Keep killing Americans and eventually, antigovernment factions within the United States will choose to give up the struggle.
It’s what happened in Somalia, isn’t it? And it’s what happened in Vietnam, too.
and
Patriots place their loyalty to their country in time of war ahead of their personal and party ambitions. And they can wrap themselves in the flag and say they “support our troops” all they like–but it doesn’t change the fact that their program is to promote our defeat at the hands of our enemies for their temporary political advantage.
Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed himself to an antiwar posture in order to get his party’s nomination.
Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the battleground that matters–American public opinion. So they will continue to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works.
The next time you listen to a Democrat presidential candidate criticize our war efforts, a network news report that constantly harps on the negative and fails to report the positive, think of the ultimate effects of those criticisms, and decide whether it is patriotic dissent about how best to portect our country, or self-promoting statements which discourage our friends and encourage our enemies? Does the candidate offer workable suggestions that will reduce terrorism, or utopian platitudes more appropriate to a high school debating clubs? Does the candidate criticize something which can be changed, or just complain about the past? Does the candidate recognize that we are in a war, a real war with dangers, uncertainties, losses, wins and confusion, or do you just hear arrogant attacks on the man who actually has the responsibility for dealing with the problems today? Does the candidate try to convince you that if it weren’t for Bush, we could focus on the “real problems” of how to spread federal money and jobs among you - as if we didn’t have enemies who have sworn to destroy our entire society, with no regard for the cost in innocent lives, and who have demonstrated both their will and capability?
In the ’70s, I watched traitors in the Democrat Party abandon Vietnam (as Mr. Card describes), give up many countries to Soviet hegemony and communist tyranny, and seriously damage our military and almost completely destroy our intelligence capabilities. We must not let them do it again! The next time, the price will be the lives of thousands more innocent civilians, and a time of terror, until the courageous among us regain power.
Traitor is a strong word. It is a politically incorrect word. We are not supposed to use it. But sometimes strong words are needed.
Certainly those on the left are not above using such strong language, constantly accusing our President of using our military as a personal instrument to enrich himself or his friends - certainly the acts of a traitor. They accuse him of starting a war for personal reasons! They accuse him of knowing of 9-11 in advance and for some mysterious reason not acting. In other words, they accuse our President of being a traitor, day in and day out.
Even worse, most of the press goes along, reporting mostly the negative; reporting the positive, if at all, with a “but” clause; reporting nutjob conspiracy theories involving our President, while not even using the word “enemy” to describe those killing American troops! In other words, the press (whose power has just been increased by “Campaign Finance Reform”) is colluding in this treachery.
So to all you leftists accusing Bush of being a selfish traitor (but not using the word), you media toads distorting every report to make the US and Bush look bad, I say: be ashamed! When we suffer the inevitable setbacks, please try to control your satisfaction - which you haven’t done too well so far; when we have successes that you can’t merely ignore, try to control your dismay - which again you have failed to do so far! When you constantly take a negative attitude, remember that your words are encouraging the people killing our troops and who want to kill you and your family.
Most Americans know real treachery when they see it, and even your almost total control of the mass media won’t hide it. If you keep it up, even your thought control police of political correctness won’t protect you from being properly labelled - as traitors! And if your policies are followed; if you succeed in tearing down our defenses and enabling our enemies,when the inevitable mass terror attack happens we won’t forget who made it happen. This time, when American civilians suffer instead of Vietnamese, we won’t forget. This time, we will hold you accountable, and so will history.
For those who do not want to be recorded in history as traitors, and those who have not been driven mad by the mere fact of a Bush presidency - read what Mr. Card has to say, and act on it!
“Angry Joe” has started a big offensive against Comrade Dean.
Excuse me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it a Democrat (JFK) who started our actions in Vietnam? And another Democrat (LBJ) who continued it? And a Republican (Nixon) who ran on a promise to get us out of Vietnam even though he escalated the war before he did get us out?
Most Democrats just think war should be used for the right reasons. Such as retaliating against an aggresive attack (Afghanistan was for a good reason). We usually don’t want to go to war just so we can keep up a national gung-ho spirit and help our VP’s former company make a butt load of money.
Actually, Nixon promised to get us out with honor, in other words, to win the war. He did and the Democrats subsequently threw away the victory by refusing to support South Vietnam. The United States first entered Vietnam under Eisenhower. It was also a Democrat who caused the major escalation of troops in Vietnam (Johnson), but Nixon who won the war by fighting it effectively, unlike Johnson, by seriously attacking the source of the problem: North Vietnam and its supply system (from mining Haiphong harbor to invading Cambodia to interdict the Ho Chi Minh trail).
If you really believe that we went to war in Iraq to help our VP’s former company “make a butt load of money”, then you are accusing Bush of mass murder for profit. Frankly, that is an extremely serious charge… a capital offense. If you think we did it to keep up a gung-ho spirit, you are an idiot. The problem with the left in this country is that they simply cannot understand the concept of pre-emptive war. They simply cannot understand how miscellaneous acts of war and diplomacy work together to cause consequences beyond the immediately obvious. They refuse to believe that Republicans can act with good intent, and rather attack our motives and accuse us of war crimes and worse. Not that there is anything new about this… those of us on the right are long used to being stereotyped as interested only in money; as “oppressors;” as “imperialists;” as “heartless” - the vicious slander from the left goes on and on. But under Bush, it has gotten much worse. You guys just cannot believe that Bush is the legitimate president of the U.S. and is acting in what he believes are our national interests. You just can’t imagine that evil folks like us conservatives would do anything except out of a lust for power or money. In other words, you folks are terribly offensive, not very smart, and are hurting national security with your constant attacks on Bush during a time of very serious war.
Which just goes to show how deluded the left is these days. As the right has noticed, the election of Bush has driven the left insane. Either that or the left is extremely unprincipled, to make such serious and utterly unsustainable charges.
Just because you don’t have the vision to understand why we conquered Iraq; that you don’t understand that we are in a war which threatens the lives of all of us; that you somehow justify retaliation but not prevention; none of that justifies your outrageous accusation against Bush.
There are many reasons we went to war against Iraq. One of them just became to obvious to deny today - when Libya publicly admitted that it had chemical and biological weapons and was close to creating an atomic bomb, and then declared that it would abandon those programs and allow in arms inspectors to verify it.
Do you think that’s just a coincidence? A country with strong ties to terrorism, which killed hundreds in the Lockerbie 747 bombing, is getting out of the terrorism and WMD business.
THAT is what the a major goal of this war is: to make all countries that threaten us this way realize that they have two choices: give up their programs or find their leaders being captured or killed by our troops. The reason for this is because there is NO WAY that we can defend ourselves against terrorism except by forcing it to have no weapons of mass destruction and no states that support it. Conquering Afghanistan wasn’t enough to achieve that.
You picked a bad time to make your argument - just after it was announced that Libya has agreed, in a very substantive manner, to stop being a threat to us.
Oh, and if you want to really understand Libya’s thinking, consider what will happen if we are attacked by a weapon of mass destruction - either a nuclear bomb killing a hundred thousand or more, or a biological weapon killing tens of thousands to tens of millions. Would you like to be in a country that just might have been the one to give the weapon to the terrorists? I wouldn’t, because it is certain that George Bush would, under those conditions, destroy the governments and military and WMD facilities of every one of those countries, as would be his duty. And he would use nuclear weapons where they were the only possibility. And 85% of Americans would support him.
The terrorists and their sponsors in the middle east, and North Korea, are watching all of this very closely. Elect Howard Dean and all hell will break loose, because they don’t believe he has the courage and understanding to deter them. Bush has already demonstrated it, with his attack on Iraq.
Now two more terrorist supporting, aggressive regimes with a WMD capability have been stopped: Iraq and Libya. So in this war, in two years we have shut down three important supporters of terrorism and destroyed at least one major WMD program.
But I guess most Democrats would wait a nuclear weapon or terrible biological weapons devastates the United States, and then retaliate. Or perhaps you guys lack the imagination needed to realize that we face, in nuclear proliferation, the worst threat the populate of the west has faced since your friends, the Soviets, went out of business (although they still have thousands of warheads on a hair trigger to hit us, in spite of Clinton’s misleading statement about retargeting). And obviously you lack the imagination and knowledge to realize that biotechnology combined with terrorism presents the most serious threat to western civilization that has ever existed. And you probably don’t realize that your buddy Castro in Cuba has one of the most advanced biological weapons programs in the world, and that Saddam had at least 13 laboratories (that we have found so far), hidden in his secret police offices, for working on those weapons.
Pretty dumb, guys. Pretty dumb.
There’s a reason that I voted for Bush. It’s because the current Democratic party cannot be trusted to protect our country from serious threats. It’s because the Democrats have long chosen the wrong side in national security issues. It’s because the Demcorats are subject to mass delusions that are dangerous - delusions about global government; delusions about the effectiveness of multinational agreements (such as non-proliferation treaties); delusions about the cause of terrorism and about the remedies available. And its because too many Democrats today are acting as traitors, attacking our efforts and making statements which have the primary effect of giving our enemies hope that Bush will be kicked out in 2004 and replaced by a high IQ idiot who will stop prosecuting this extremely critical war.
Bravo!
Useful Fools
Useful Fools has some excellent articles going right now. Here’s a nice treatise on the current state of the Democrat party. John makes some excellent points and even gets Orson Scott Card’s recent comments involved. From Useful Fools:So to all
In a comment at this entry at the ‘Pardon My English’ weblog, I responded to a commenter (”Aaron”) in that thread, who wrote:
“Any Democrat, besides say Lieberman, would immediately retreat our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, making it a fertile groudn for future terror attacks that would ultimately find its way to the US.”
I pointed out that this was not the case. Even Dr. Dean stated that he believes that U.S. troops should stay in Iraq, and that we should not withdraw. Some news reports from some weeks ago indicated that Rumsfeld was having strong doubts about the Iraqi mission, and wanted to get our troops out as soon as possible.
I have seen reports that the Bush administration may consider withdrawing our troops from that situation shortly before the election. Anyway, what our government is doing in Iraq right now is liberal, and is something that Democrats should strongly support, while those of us who are conservatives and Republicans should be opposing this.
Aakash, one should never let ideology blind one to the realities. That is the problem democrats have right now, and one that you also appear to have.
It is conservative to defend our national interests. Most conservatives believe that creating a successful, friendly democratic state in Iraq is in our interest. While you are worried about whether our policy is “conservative,” many of the rest of us are aware that we are in an extremely serious war, and in war, you do what is necessary to defend your country and defeat your enemy.
Ideology, especially conservative ideology, is good to follow, but one must remember that ideology is at best a guide, not an absolute set of rules. Those who interpret it otherwise are fanatics and are not dealing with reality, but rather a set of rules that they assume applies to every situation.
I strongly support Bush’s actions in the war. If we were not at war, and did not face the terrorist and WMD proliferation threat, these actions would be taken in a very different light - they would be Wilsonian rather than what they really are: realistic.
The conversion of Libya is a fantastic victory that would never have happened if we followed your advise.
On the other hand, the following, the first clause of which applies to you, is true, if you substitute the word “idealist” for liberal: A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head. ~Benjamin Disraeli