Lucy, Howard and the Football

While on the topic of sucky jobs, I can't decide if Howard Dean has the best job or worst.

On the one hand, it must be thrilling to have the full power of the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and most news media behind you as you posit impossibility. Being at the helm of the losing party election after election, you have no real downside left. If things can't get worse, they must be pretty good, right? So, feel free to tell us how badly the war is going, we cannot win; how the President committed impeachable offenses. And while you are at it, completely rewrite history.

On the other hand, it has to be awful to have to put forth the proposition your country simply cannot win a just war, even as it is clearly winning that war. The only way your position can result in success for your political party is for your country to fail in its mission to protect its citizens from the largest organized pirate band in human history*. You have to preach failure, and so Howard Dean does. All in the name of morality and patriotism, of course.

Well, such a position would be awful, if you had any real sense of morality, and a rational understanding of history.

Dean still insists this war is exactly like Vietnam, and when we turned that war over to the Vietnamese, they simply could not hold on. Of course, the reality is the plan for "vietnamization" of that war called for substantial and ongoing support for South Vietnam after our troops left. That was the deal, and all was going well, with the ARVN troops dominating the battlefield until Ted Kennedy and his ilk chose to abandon them by pulling their funding. The Democrats in Congress reneged, and the Vietnam War lost.

Like Lucy and Charlie Brown, we snatched the football away just as our friends were kicking with all their hearts. This is what the Democrats are setting up today, in Iraq.

Yep, that is the lesson of Vietnam-- that abandoning a cause and an ally could mean loss of a war. And Howard Dean can only look good if we lose.

The Democrats hide behind "patriotism" and free speech. In fact, the only time the word "patriotism" is used, is when Democrats call for failure and insist their patriotism not be questioned. Yet, I never hear a Republican actually say any Democrat in not patriotic. Nobody calls Democrats' patriotism into question except the Democrats themselves.

But, when you use "free speech" to call for your country's failure and defeat in war, it isn't patriotic. It's treasonous.


* Mohammed did this when he invented Islam. More on this later.