[Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's nest.... (political)

[brad haslett]

Slim,

Forgive me, I lied.  It is only 5am and I do have time
for one more post.  This is something I ran across
reading the morning papers.  Buchanan is not a
favorite of mine but sometimes he "gets it".  Enjoy.

Brad

--------------
November 16, 2005
The Politics of War and the Patriot Card
By Pat Buchanan

Since the indictment of Scooter Libby, President Bush
and Vice President Cheney have been under relentless
assault. 

The gravamen of the charge is that Bush, Cheney and
the War Party cherry-picked and hyped the intelligence
on Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's ties to al-Qaida and 9-11,
and spoke of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities based on
flimsy evidence and forged documents that Saddam had
reconstituted his nuclear weapons program. 

Echoed by anti-Bush media that can smell blood in the
water, the Democratic Party is charging that Bush
misled, deceived or lied us into war. With polls
showing 57 percent of the nation no longer believes
Bush to be honest and truthful, the unanswered charges
have had a devastating impact. 

But Bush has a last card to play, and on Veterans Day,
he played it, the ace of trumps in any president's
hand: the patriot card. 

Speaking in Pennsylvania to the troops, Bush said that
pro-war Democrats like John Kerry saw the same
intelligence he did and voted to take Saddam down, and
that Democrats now accusing him of faking intelligence
are undercutting our fighting troops in Iraq. 

Translation: Democrats are giving aid and comfort to
the enemy in time of war. We are one step away form
the T-word. 

With his poll ratings at rock bottom and little to
lose, Bush has just escalated the war politics.
Democrats who have had it all their way since Cindy
Sheehan set up Camp Casey would do well to wonder
whether they have not ridden out a little too far into
Indian country and are heading for the Little Big Horn
where their daddies disappeared long ago. 

In the late 1940s, the Party of Truman and FDR was
shredded by Nixon, Bill Jenner and Joe McCarthy for
having sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta, lost China,
and coddled communists and Stalinist spies like Alger
Hiss and Harry Dexter White. And there was a reason
the attacks stuck. They had the ancillary benefit of
being true. 

The media may have rewritten history to make the
Edward R. Murrow Left look like the heroes of the era,
but the Democratic Party never recovered from the
charge its leaders had groveled to Stalin. JFK knew
it, and ran and won the presidency as an
anti-communist hawk. 

A generation later, Nixon and Agnew charged the
Democratic Party with having marched us into Vietnam
and then, when the going got tough, of having turned
tail, cut and run, and gone over the hill to march
with the children against the war into which they had
themselves led the United States. Those charges stuck
for the same reason: They were true. 

Between 1961 and 1969, when America was plunged into
Vietnam, Washington was Democratic, from the White
House to the Capitol to the pro-war Washington Post.
When Nixon arrived in 1969, Democrats started calling
it "Nixon's War," but the country knew it was a
Democratic war. And when the liberals turned on Nixon,
America turned on them and gave him a 49-state
landslide. Vietnam was the wheel on which liberalism
was broken and the FDR New Deal coalition shattered
forever. 

Now, Democrats have maneuvered themselves onto the
same risky terrain once again. 

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice took us to war, but
Democrats were the happiest of camp followers. And
everybody knows it. Daschle, Kerry, Edwards, Biden,
Clinton and Schumer all declared Saddam a threat to
the Middle East and the United States. All voted in
October 2002 to give Bush his blank check to take us
to war. Now that the war is dragging on toward its
fourth year, now that footage of young men trying to
walk with artificial limbs is on nightly TV, now that
the morning papers report three or four more American
dead every day, they are trying to say they were
misled, they were deceived, they were lied to. It's
not our fault! 

But the truth is they failed America. They handed to
Bush the war power the Constitution had given to them.
Having enlisted enthusiastically in a "cakewalk" war,
national Democrats and Big Media are deserting and
applying for conscientious objector status in what now
appears an endless war. 

Sorry, it is too late for that. 

What Bush was saying in Pennsylvania is this: You may
accuse me of falsifying intelligence, but you are
falsifying history. And you will not get away with it.
I am going to fight it out on this line, even if it
costs me my presidency. But if I am going down, you
are going down with me. 

If Iraq is lost to chaos and civil war, and this is a
historic defeat and strategic disaster for the United
States, Bush is saying, I will charge you with cutting
and running, abandoning our troops under fire and
losing the Iraq war. No wonder Bill and Hillary seem
wary of throwing in with the Cindy Sheehan crowd. 




--- Slim <salm at mn.rr.com> wrote:

> Never mind the spin or the rhetoric, forget about
> so-called intelligence,
> never mind your own left or right stripes.  What
> does your gut really say to
> you about this war?  Here's what mine tells me:
> 
> First the tyranny of Saddam. This is no reason to
> invade a sovereign state.
> The US has ignored or even supported so many tyrants
> I can't count 'em.  But
> just to name a few, Pinochet, The Shaw of Iran, Kim
> Jong Ill, even Saddam
> himself was armed by the US.  So we say, "He's
> abusing his own citizens so
> we better go in there and take him down."  Not only
> is this bad foreign
> policy, but it's bullshit policy because we don't
> really care.  We didn't
> care about the Shaw's death squads or Pinochet's. 
> Why now Saddam?  The
> whole tyrant argument holds no water at all.
> 
> The same goes for the argument about spreading
> freedom and democracy. What a
> load of crap!  Don't tell me that our government
> actually give a rat's ass
> about an Iraqi democracy.  No, I'm not saying
> democracy itself is crap, but
> why would we care about Iraq when we don't care
> about the dozens of other
> non-democratic countries?  Why Iraq?  Why not invade
> Cuba?  Isn't Fidel a
> tyrant?  Why not North Korea?  We know Kim Jong Ill
> is a tyrant.  This is
> bad foreign policy.
> 
> I agreed with Mike Abdullah when he stated we had no
> business in Kuwait in
> the first place.  We shouldn't be fighting other
> countries' border battles.
> As Mike said, What was Saddam going to do with his
> oil?  Drink it?  He was
> selling it on the open market and black market just
> like every other Arab
> state.  That was bad foreign policy.
> 
> But whatever, then we had Saddam completely
> contained with the no-fly-zone
> and the sanctions.  He was no threat to us.  Perhaps
> he was a "threat" to
> Israel, but why go to war with someone you've
> already beaten?  This is bad
> foreign policy.
> 
> Did we need to go in and hunt for WMD?  Do we need
> to go into ANY country
> hunting for WMD?  Again, why not North Korea?  This
> is bad foreign policy.
> 
> Did we need to go into Iraq to control the oil?  No.
>  What have oil prices
> done since then?  The exact same thing they would
> have done had we not gone
> to war.  They've gone up.  Happy now?
> 
> Did we need to go into Iraq as a response to 9/11? 
> This is asinine foreign
> policy.  Everyone knows Saddam had nothing to do
> with that.
> 
> Thousands are now dead or wounded so Halliburton
> could make a windfall.
> Folks, the definition of Fascism is when government
> is in bed with business.
> THIS IS VERY BAD FOREIGN POLICY!
> 
> Our government is despised by nearly every soul
> outside our borders.  And
> over half those inside!  Do polls dictate our
> policy?  I think not.
> Although I noticed the Indonesians' attitude towards
> us perked up a bit
> after all the tsunami relief money that poured in. 
> But even our low-key,
> happy neighbors to the north hate Bush.  The joke
> going around Canada is
> that all you have to do to get elected is to be
> anti-Bush.  I won't go into
> how mein furor is screwing Canada on the softwoods
> issue.  I'll leave that
> for another thread.  But we buy lots and lots of oil
> from Canada so we ought
> to be nice to her.  Guess who else wants Canadian
> oil?  China.  And lots and
> lots of it.  Maybe we should invade Canada.  Yeah,
> that's the ticket, eh!
> 
> It's beyond me how anyone can favor this war for any
> reason.
> 
> Slim
> 
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