Senate adopts ‘exit strategy’ from reality

Monday, November 21st, 2005 5:41 pm by Neal

Mark Steyn is at it again with Senate adopts ‘exit strategy’ from reality.

A busy time in the U.S. Senate, the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Judging from the 2006 conference report, the Senate subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education — Chairman Arlen Specter (R), ranking member Tom Harkin (D) — has been deliberating especially hard:

“Sec. 221. (a) The Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center Building (Building 21) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hereby renamed as the Arlen Specter Headquarters and Emergency Operations Center.

(b) The Global Communications Center Building (Building 19) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is hereby renamed as the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications Center.”

Good to see that even in the viciously partisan atmosphere of today’s politics, Republicans and Democrats can still work together to carry out the people’s business. In the same spirit, I wonder whether the Senate chamber itself should not be renamed the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi United States Senate. With increasingly rare exceptions, just about everything that emerges from the chamber tends to support the Zarqawi view of Iraq — that this is a psychological war in which the Great Satan is an effete wimp who can be worn down and chased back to his La-Z-Boy recliner in Florida.

The US Senate, once a laughingstock, has progressed from being a disgrace to an outright menace to Americans who value liberty and understand just what we’re up against in the War against Islamic fascism. Steyn presents this quote to demonstrate that even Asian heads-of-state have more of a clue than the US Senate:

“The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.” That’s Goh Chok Tong speaking in Washington last year. Unfortunately, he’s not a U.S. senator, but the prime minister of Singapore, and thus ineligible to run, on the grounds that he’s not a citizen of Blowhardistan. What does the Senate’s revolting amendment tell America’s enemies (Zarqawi) and “friends” (Chirac) about her will to prevail?

To anyone paying attention, this much is crystal clear: the Democrats are actively trying to lose this war. Like Steyn, I do question their patriotism, and I think their insanity goes beyond their hatred of President Bush. During this entire campaign, Democrats have believed the worst about the troops, not the best. In their little conspiracy-theory minds, they’ve assumed the most evil intentions, never the most decent. They seethe at America projecting power into Afghanistan and Iraq in order to eradicate terrorist regimes and to liberate millions of oppressed, enslaved peoples. They lie that we’ve “killed 1 million babies in Iraq,” that we “invaded Iraq for its oil,” and even that “Bush planned the 9/11 attacks.” They are nothing more than elected traitors, and their supporters are naive dumb-asses.

Steyn concludes with this gem:

One expects nothing from the Democrats. Their leaders are men like Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, who in 2002 voted for the war and denounced Saddam Hussein as an “imminent threat” and claimed that Iraq could have nuclear weapons by 2007 if not earlier. Now he says it’s Bush who “lied” his way into war with a lot of scary mumbo-jumbo about WMD.

What does Rockefeller believe, really? I know what Bush believes: He thought Saddam should go in 2002 and today he’s glad he’s gone, as am I. I know what, say, Michael Moore believes: He wanted to leave Saddam in power in 2002, and today he thinks the “insurgents” are the Iraqi version of America’s Minutemen. But what do Rockefeller and Reid and Kerry believe deep down? That voting for the war seemed the politically expedient thing to do in 2002 but that they’ve since done the math and figured that pandering to the moveon.org crowd is where the big bucks are? If Bush is the new Hitler, these small hollow men are the equivalent of those grubby little Nazis whose whining defense was, “I was only obeying orders. I didn’t really mean all that strutting tough-guy stuff.” And, before they huff, “How dare you question my patriotism?”, well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism — because you’re failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you, Iraq is a quagmire — not in the Sunni Triangle, where U.S. armed forces are confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.

It’s easy to laugh at the empty shell of a Jay Rockefeller, bragging about how he schmoozed Bashar Assad, dictator of a terrorist state, about Bush’s war intentions. But look at the news from France and ask yourself what that’s really about? At heart, it’s the failure of Europe’s political class to grasp the profound and rapid changes already under way. This Senate is making the same fatal error. I’d advocate throwing the bums out if there were any alternative bums to throw in. But maybe the Thomas R. Harkin Centers for Disease Control could persuade them to be the first deliberative body to donate itself to medical science.

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