Liberals Are Dangerous

“I don’t like you, cause you’re gonna get me killed.”

During the 1990s Bill Clinton’s military inadequacies were largely ignored in the euphoria of the economic boom and the distractions of his female problems. Consequently, the first attack on the World Trade Center and the terrorist strike at the USS Cole faded from memory and were not thought of as attacks on fortress-America. September 11, 2001 changed all that.

George Bush’s presidency awoke to the danger. “National-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.” (Victor Davis Hansen, National Review Online, 12/30/05)

Then an ugly thing happened within the Democratic Party. They remembered Vietnam and how opposition to that war was a political winner for a string of politicians beginning with John Kerry and Ted Kennedy, who forgot that his brother started the war and made a career of opposing the US military. Howard Dean woke up the anti-war fever swamp types, Michael Moore provided the artistic propaganda and George Sorros the bucks. Democrats followed like liberal lemmings and lost the 2004 election big-time.

One would think that the Democratic Party would have learned the lesson that Americans do not like to be attacked by foreigners. Instead they assailed President Bush for his strategy, calling the war in Iraq a diversion from the main task of defeating al-Qaeda. He was accused of using distorted intelligence about the presence of WMD to invade Iraq. And they are now calling for impeachment because Bush used his war powers to obtain wiretaps on calls between foreign terrorists and suspected American supporters. It’s like history is repeating itself.

Peter Schweizer wrote (Opinion Journal, 12/30/05) about how Franklin D. Roosevelt faced very similar critics during World War II. FDR was criticized on the basis that Germany did not pose an immediate military threat to the United States the way that Japan did. He was accused of purposely ignoring evidence that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor. Part of FDR's motivation for defeating Germany first was fear that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, whereas it was later revealed that Germany did not have much of a program. And he put over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans into internment camps.

“Bush is in many ways FDR's strategic soul mate. His war on terror is a total global war against a movement comprised of terrorist groups and their state sponsors. By ousting both Saddam and the Taliban, he has removed two important components of the worldwide terrorist movement. And his grand strategy is slowly achieving results.” (Schweizer)

Of course Democrats fail to see the similarities between these two presidents and their wars, as that would cast aspersions on their sainted FDR. But Franklin was one tough son of a bitch. From one of his addresses to the nation he explained his treatment of war protesters: “The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of Government.”

The inevitable tension between protecting the country and maintaining civil liberties goes back to the founding. Lincoln spoke of it during the Civil War:
“Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and for the rest of the war, military officers could arrest U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely without presenting evidence against them. In 1863, Congress passed the Habeas Corpus Act, effectively endorsing Lincoln's earlier suspension of the "Great Writ."

Like the Tory sympathizers in the Revolutionary War, the Northern secessionists of the Civil War, or the “secret agents and their dupes” that FDR dealt with in WWII, the left wing obstructionist Democrats need to be put in a place where they can do no harm. I’d suggest France.