Country at a Crossroads

One of the most frustrating aspects of the past few years has been the shobboleth that "real patriots are those who criticize the government" coming from people who didn't have a problem with - or didn't openly speak out against - Bill Clinton's war in Bosnia (no UN approval or threat to America) or his attacking of two Muslim countries with cruise missiles, blowing up an aspirin factory in Sudan (don't the anti-Americans claim that we brought 9/11 upon ourselves?) because his tubby mistress was testifying about Stupid Cigar Tricks and the ramifications of not getting the evidence cleaned.

Pointing out liberal hypocrisy is like reminding people that fish in the sea tend to be constantly damp - seemingly obvious, but news to some. With the Countdown to Armageddon clock standing at t-minus-5 days, it appears that there are still some idiots who think the answer to the Dubya problem is to elect Kerry because "he can't be any worse" (despite oodles of evidence to prove otherwise.)

The lessons of history are ignored when ideologically inconvenient to the Left, by historian Victor Davis Hanson reminds us that at many times, we've had some tough choices to make and, fortunately, we've made the choices that have allowed the general comfort and safety that allows today's ill-informed and maliciously treasonous the latitude to espouse their smug pieties in the hope that America will slit it's own throat.

The full text is in the print version of National Review, but this sample says enough:

Had Lincoln lost the 1864 vote, a victorious General McClellan would have settled for an American continent divided, with slavery intact. Without Woodrow Wilson's reelection in 1916 — opposed by the isolationists — Western Europe would have lost millions only to be trampled by Prussian militarism. Franklin Roosevelt's interventionism saved liberal democracy. And without the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and his unpopular agenda for remaking the military, the Soviet Union might still be subsidizing global murder.

This election marks a similar crossroads in our history. We are presented with two radically different candidates with profound disagreements about how to conduct a historic worldwide war. We should remember that all our victorious past presidents were, at the moments of their crises, deeply unpopular precisely because they chose the difficult, long-term sacrifice for victory over the expedient and convenient pleas for accommodation (if not outright capitulation). We are faced with just such an option today: a choice between a president whose call for patience and sacrifice promises victory, and a pessimist stirring the people with the assurances that we should not have fought, and now cannot win, the present war in Iraq.

Our terrorist enemy has no uniforms or aircraft, but nevertheless struck at the very heart of our financial and political capitals in a fashion unimaginable by Nazi Germany, Tojo's Japan, or the Soviet Union. The Islamic fascists' creed is Hitlerian, their methodology primeval. Their aim is not mere territory: They want nothing less than the destruction of Western freedom, through the takeover of the Middle East and the use of its petroleum wealth to craft a nuclear, global caliphate, Dark Aged in its values, 21st-century in its lethality.

This war against Islamic fascism is now a quarter-century old, and began with the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in 1979; the apex of this escalating assault — owing to past American neglect and appeasement — was September 11. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and John Kerry — so unlike their Democratic predecessors FDR, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy — have seen the struggle not as one for national survival, but at best as the lamentable dividend of inequality or poverty, and at worst as the felonious behavior of a few miscreants who seem to eat, sleep, and bank in the upper air rather than in the houses and streets of real countries. Thus arose John Kerry's revealing use of "sensitive" and "nuisance" to suggest that we need to return either to writs and indictments or the occasional cruise missile — i.e., the status quo before the world changed on 9/11.

Even though I'm dissatisfied with Dubya and am not voting for him, you don't see me voting to sacrifice my country to settle my differences over his stewardship. I hope others reach the same conclusion, because the price to be paid will make 9/11 look like a picnic and you know damn well, the Left won't accept responsibility for the carnage.