This year's Democratic plan for the future is another inane sound bite designed to trick American voters into trusting them with national security.
To wit, they're claiming there is no connection between the war on terror and the war in Iraq, and while they're all for the war against terror -- absolutely in favor of that war -- they are adamantly opposed to the Iraq war. You know, the war where the U.S. military is killing thousands upon thousands of terrorists (described in the media as "Iraqi civilians," even if they are from Jordan, like the now-dead leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). That war.
As Howard Dean put it this week, "The occupation in Iraq is costing American lives and hampering our ability to fight the real global war on terror."
This would be like complaining that Roosevelt's war in Germany was hampering our ability to fight the real global war on fascism. Or anti-discrimination laws were hampering our ability to fight the real war on racism. Or dusting is hampering our ability to fight the real war on dust.
Maybe Dean is referring to a different globe, like Mars or Saturn, or one of those new planets they haven't named yet.
Assuming against all logic and reason that the Democrats have some serious objection to the war in Iraq, perhaps they could tell us which part of the war on terrorism they do support. That would be easier than rattling off the long list of counterterrorism measures they vehemently oppose.
They oppose the National Security Agency listening to people who are calling specific phone numbers found on al-Qaida cell phones and computers. Spying on al-Qaida terrorists is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror!
Enraged that the Bush administration deferred to the safety of the American people rather than the obstructionist Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, one Clinton-appointed judge, James Robertson, resigned from the FISA court in protest over the NSA spying program.
Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold called for a formal Senate censure of President Bush when he found out the president was rude enough to be listening in on al-Qaida phone calls. (Wait until Feingold finds out the White House has been visiting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "MySpace" page!)
Last week a federal judge appointed by Jimmy Carter ruled the NSA program to surveil phone calls to al-Qaida members in other counties unconstitutional.
Democrats oppose the detainment of Taliban and al-Qaida soldiers at our military base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Democrats such as Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, have called for Guantanamo to be shut down.
The Guantanamo detainees are not innocent insurance salesmen imprisoned in some horrible mix-up like something out of a Perry Mason movie. The detainees were captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. You remember -- the war liberals pretended to support right up until approximately one nanosecond after John Kerry conceded the 2004 election to President Bush.
But apparently, imprisoning al-Qaida warriors we catch on the battlefield is hampering our ability to fight the global war on terror.
Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has compared Guantanamo to Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags, based on a report that some detainees were held in temperatures so cold that they shivered and others were forced to listen to loud rap music -- more or less approximating the conditions in the green room at "The Tyra Banks Show." Also, one of the detainees was given a badminton racket that was warped.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert complained this week that detainees in Guantanamo have "no hope of being allowed to prove their innocence." (I guess that's excluding the hundreds who have been given administrative hearings or released already.)
Of course all the usual "human rights" groups are carping about how brutally our servicemen in Guantanamo are treating the little darlings who are throwing feces at them.
Democrats oppose the Patriot Act, the most important piece of legislation passed since 9/11, designed to make the United States less of a theme park for would-be terrorists.
The vast majority of Senate Democrats (43-2) voted against renewing the Patriot Act last December, whereupon their minority leader, Sen. Harry Reid, boasted: "We killed the Patriot Act" -- a rather unusual sentiment for a party so testy about killing terrorists.
In 2004, Sen. John Kerry -- the man they wanted to be president -- called the Patriot Act "an assault on our basic rights." At least all "basic rights" other than the one about not dying a horrible death at the hand of Islamic fascists. Yes, it was as if Congress had deliberately flown two commercial airliners into the twin towers of our Constitution.
They oppose profiling Muslims at airports.
They oppose every bust of a terrorist cell, sneering that the cells in Lackawanna, New York City, Miami, Chicago and London weren't a real threat like, say, a nondenominational prayer before a high school football game. Now that's a threat.
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