Dartblog

Barack Obama yesterday prescribed the following for Afghanistan, where United States and other forces remain in the wake of the decapitation of the Taliban government:

We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

It is a useful little slip, wouldn’t you say? A flighting reveal of the fact that anti-American thinkers have a real voice in the Democratic Party; have an inspiring role in foreign policy. I mean only so far as defense goes. There is no ‘anti-American’ position on, say, abortion; but there is plainly an anti-American position on whether troop deployments to al Qaeda-infested countries is a good idea. And if the question is whether or not to falsely claim that American soldiers are murdering innocents, there is an anti-American position on that, too.

The Democrats, I think, represent ordinary left-of-center Americans quite well: they stand for a more progressive tax code, for fewer restrictions on abortion, for more restrictions on commerce, for cultural sectarianism, against religion in the public square, et cetera. And the left has done some degree of thinking on all of these issues. As a longstanding rule, Democrats lack a philosophy that pulls it all together; their positions are often contradictory because they are formed by a rainbow of pressure groups. The party professes to be libertine but is far more supportive of regulation than deregulation.

But at least Democrats’ positions are representative of a subset of voters. One cannot write the Democrats off as anti-democratic simply because they exist as a dumb menagerie of dicta from NARAL, the ACLU, La Raza, and such. Dumb menageries are democratic, too.

But with modern Democrats one can always feel a faint palpitation of the old blame-America-first attitude when it comes to foreign policy. Unlike most people who vote for Democrats, many Democratic politicians themselves are actually ready to believe horrible things about the American military. Here’s Obama saying that, in Afghanistan, we are occupied with “air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” If that statement were reported as the outrage it is, it’d sink his bid for the presidency. The average registered Democrat recoils at such talk. The average registered Democrat should like to punch Noam Chomsky in the face when he speaks of “imperialism” as though America were something less than a bright beacon still guiding the human race. And Obama’s glory would wither, to the average voting Democrat, if politicians these days were held accountable for what they say.

A 527 with airtime can force a man to the point of accountability, of course. John Kerry lost his campaign for president in large part because the electorate was asked to reckon with his anti-war puppetry from the seventies. It couldn’t. (From the congressional well, you’ll recall, Kerry said American soldiers had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, [and] razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” All this was aired on television and Kerry lost tremendous amounts of support.)

But why is it that professional Democrats actually allow fifth columnists to box their ears so that, in a moment of clarity, a man like Barack Obama might claim that the 40,000 American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are razing little villages and murdering civilians despite overwhelming evidence that the exact opposite is true?

I imagine Democrats occasionally judge it “unfair” that they lose elections due to perceived weakness on issues of national security. But are they not, indeed, weak? Doesn’t Hillary Clinton’s entire strategy concede this Democratic weakness on security by actively attempting to reverse it?