Scene: .Driving through Jacksonville, NC where hundreds of homemade banners welcome a contingent of Marines back from Iraq. .Stopping in a shopping center where wives and children cling to daddy (and in some cases mommy), happy he is home, their pride in his uniform shining in their eyes.
Scene: .The father of a slain army sergeant holding back tears at the burial of his youngest son."He died for his country and I am very proud," he says to the camera. "He fought so others could be free."
These scenes involve real people, so real they transcend the artificial reality of the political debate over the US mission in Iraq. Does it really matter whether or not intelligence reports were inexact about the existence of so-called "weapons of mass destruction" since the justification for ending the regime of Saddam Hussein was obviously the right decision? The Maximum Leader of Iraq was a genocidal tyrant responsible for the cold-blooded murder of hundreds of thousands of his political enemies and a constant threat to stability in the Middle East. His remaining followers, syncretic gangs impassioned by a lunatic doctrinal cocktail of secular Nasser-styled Ba'athism and Bin-Laden concocted Islamic extremism, are the heart of the darkness of the global Al-qaeda terrorist campaign.
Now we know that Saddam maintained he was in possession of chemical and nuclear weapons for fear he would be invaded by Iran if he admitted his weakness. The WMD issue, stirred up by the non-issue of the covert cover name of the mediocre CIA employee Valerie Plame (aided and abetted by her cover boy husband Joseph Wilson) is a lame sortie to bring down the Bush administration to end the war in Iraq.
We expect Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the gang to attack the war and, in the process expose their genetic hatred for the United States. Soldiers in the field expect this as a function of the death throes of the Old Left: They act more and more desperately and hysterically as the end nears for their nearly extinct political positions.
THE MURTHA MATTER
But John Murtha is another story. The Vietnam veteran and United States Congressman, associated with the admired species we used to call Conservative Democrats, suddenly performed a public volte face on the war, suggesting-in neo-Vietnam era key words-that we pull out of Iraq. Like the anti-war gang already in place, Murtha offered no agenda and no solution to the problems a withdrawal raises. He just had a mysterious come-to-Jesus moment and transformed himself from a patriot to a coward-and a traitor.
Yes, traitor: to his uniform, as he knows personally the effect of what he has done to the men and women on the ground in Iraq; and to his country, the one he used to fight for, for undermining the official policy of the United States in wartime. Murtha's anti-war epiphany-typical of these episodes, it is not thought out and serves only to assuage some inner angst he feels the need to extinguish by a public demonstration-coming as it does from a veteran, inflicts real pain on the military. He knows this, so he is fully conscious that his silly little mental breakdown is taken as a serious incident. The quality of his citizenship is in question, and for sure you don't want to be in a foxhole with Jack Murtha.
As it turns out, no matter how the far Left, and its pliable media consorts, trumpet Murtha's treachery (NPR: "what courage it took for him to do this"), only 19 percent of Americans think we should pull out of Iraq before finishing the job. The Marines and their families in Jacksonville, the parents of slain American soldiers who believe in the heroism of their children: This is the real America, the one that will defy its traitors and carry on in the name of freedom and liberty for all people everywhere.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
North Carolina's US Senator Liddy Dole has been gone from North Carolina so long she is actually a clone of another outsider US Senator, Hillary Clinton, the Chicago-born Arkansas-seasoned political diva who duped New Yorkers into thinking she had their interests at heart. Dole's reversal on condoning interim funding of the notoriously corrupt and ludicrous rail transit plan for Raleigh and the Triangle is contemptible. I guess she just changed her mind.
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If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, as the Beatles noted, read the new biography Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chiang and husband Jon Holliday. The first paragraph sets the tone: "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other 20th-century leader." Gee, remember the activists and academics who praised the "Great Helmsman"? They are still teaching on campus, tenured and unrepentant.
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Chicken Little indeed. The panic over "bird flu" has gripped the chattering classes with another round of apocalyptic seizures. They typically magnify potential problems through the lens of their internationalistic view, born of the belief in the "one-world" calculus of the human condition. This too will pass until the next delusional episode that spells world catastrophe and proves our weakness as nation-states. Flu victims of the world unite!