On his radio program this morning, Bill Bennett spoke to a gentleman from the Hudson Institute. Drawing from Cold War terminology, the guest identified three broad classes in the current war: terrorists, anti-terrorists and anti-anti-terrorists. Like their twice-against-communist counterparts, those in the third group are, in a paraphrase of the man's words but no less apparent to many of us, "More worried about John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and George W. Bush than they are Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi."
Just over a week ago the Wall Street Journal featured a want ad in the form of an editorial, soliciting a "constructive opposition." That service is not to be found in the leftward Democratic Party, whose membership has invested over some forty months more rhetorical, monetary and electoral capital into domestic political victories — of unsuccessful consummation for token worth — than, in defense of this country and the free world it has helped rear, the defeat of an authoritarian threat that is so manifest in essence and intent as to preclude conversation that strays from plans for victory.
Victory? Nothing like that from the left. The Democratic Party's current national chairman Howard Dean once wavered on the culpability of leaders of the Baghdad Ba'ath and al Qaeda before he spoke of fellow Americans as "evil," "the enemy"; men who were certainly not his neighbor. In last year's presidential race the American electorate was proferred a new executive on the grounds that the one standing was a malevolent force of nature, those he liberated a score-of-a-million nuisance. To the left, triumphs are equally unimportant and distasteful; odd twists can be read, mocking fair elections in free Iraq and Afghanistan as stagecraft while clapping for the pastiche horror of fascist Iran. Losses are never accepted the property of war and serendipity but blamed on this country or its allies or, most crookedly, some sort of prerogative of stone-cold murderers.
If this war is difficult, it is in part because one-third of the country sidles back and forth between accedence and figment.
TEN THOUSAND: Contrary to the words of a ghoulish strongman's patsy like Briton George Galloway, Saddam Hussein's fall sowed the Near East with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.