This Battle for Iraq is driving the hard left to drink. They just can’t get it and it’s killing them. Here they have a President who they believe can’t tie his shoelaces who, without much help from the rest of world, sets his army off to a vast, hot, dangerous, and yes, evil country, for reasons he himself can’t quite articulate, and the American people support him overwhelmingly and almost without reservation. And to top it all off he directs the Attorney General to lock up and throw the key away with respect to those who are captured or detained or under suspicion that they may do harm to our people, or our cities or other national targets, and again the American people remain generally silent, unwilling to protest what is pretty much a violation of the constitution. The hard left and their fellow travelers just can’t get their minds around this and its cause for concern among the cognoscenti. The problem is what they are failing to grasp is the exceptional nature of the American experiment.
From the very beginning of our brief history the American people understood that they were participating in an experiment that had never been tried before...the establishment of a government to protect the individual freedom of those that lived within its borders. Note, I did not say citizens. Quite a simple concept, but one that turned on its head the general philosophy that existed at the time, namely, the purpose of people was to establish and then protect government from other governments. The theory being that ultimately people would find their protection within a government which had few or no constraints. We know today this philosophy never quite worked and inevitably results in tyranny. The fact that our descendants knew this then is quite remarkable since their education wasn’t very much better than the general population of other European countries at that time.
What is so surprising is that those white propertied males, who made up the citizenry of the early American Republic were able, over time, to convince a much larger group of citizens, made of females, blacks, Hispanics and a general assortment of other ethnics, races and cultures that the theory is one which should be supported and defended, even with blood, if necessary. But what seems to be unusual about the Battle for Iraq is that this is probably the first time in American history that there is a general consensus among the population that it is better to fight the enemies of freedom somewhere else rather than at home and to start that fight first without waiting for the enemy to arrive here. What obviously drives this belief is the attack of the homeland on 9/11. And this is what the hard left can’t seem to absorb. They refer to Vietnam. But no one is listening. They refer to the "gestapo tactics" of Attorney General Ashcroft. But no one is listening. They get hysterical about the random killings of our troops in Iraq. The American people are disturbed, angry, frustrated and definitely saddened by the deaths of these soldiers, each one a prize of prizes among the citizenry. But there is no talk of retreat. The streets are empty of protesters. And what makes it even worse for the hard left, perhaps for the first time since they became a force of opinion in the country, is that the American people smell, among them, a rat. The American people sense that there is a strong element of anti-Americanism, an anti-exceptionalism among the hard left. And if this true, this is probably the biggest reason for their unwillingness to be too convinced by the arguments of the hard left among us.
The hard left accuses America and its army of imperialism. The American public seems to agree and just doesn’t give a damn.
The Country Lawyer
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