I’m Sick to Death of Politics, Part I

I suppose some of you have noticed that I just haven’t been blogging very much lately. Every blogger goes through those ups and downs at times when they just step away, then come back and blog with renewed energy, and I’ve done those things too. Lately, though, there’s just been this pernicious haze that’s fallen over current events, a certain close-in knife-fighting sort of nastiness that demands that it not end until there’s blood and someone’s intestines lying on the floor.

Over the weekend we heard “journalist” Bob Woodward’s allegations that of course the Bush Administration was an “imperial court” where the dunce President laughed as nobly-insisted warnings about 9/11 and calamity in Iraq were delivered and pointedly ignored. The heroes in this story, of course, are administration criticis who have since left their government jobs and are now making a good bit of money giving talks and publishing books critical of the President and the people who have remained to see the job through to the end.

We’ve heard all this before, from disgruntled former government employees and unnamed sources to cowardly to step into the light with their evidence and, quite honestly, I’m sick to death of it. The focus of the MSM and the opposition party has shifted completely from how we should fight the war we’re in to destroying President Bush’s administration by any means necessary. Heck, most in the opposition are even disputing whether there’s a war on at all. The debate of over “torture”, as if we are pulling the fingernails off of innocent Arab children in underground dungeons in the hopes that they’ll inform on their Daddies and Mommies or that we’re singlehandedly demolishing the Geneva Conventions as if the nations of the world followed them like Holy Writ is just another chapter in the Story of Destroying Bush. Even though detainees at the dreaded Guantanamo Bay facility are treated better than any criminal in any prison in the United States, we still want to wring out hands about our own behavior instead of killing the enemy so that they can’t behead innocent civilians, murder homosexuals, and hang little girls.

But it isn’t us that’s the problem. It’s the President, specificall the letter “R” that appears after the President’s name. Despite a response that has the international jihadists in a far worse situation than they were in 2000 or 2001, we are still told that we’re losing everywhere, or better yet, that there’s no real war happening at all.

There’s only one reason for that: politics. When a former President can sit in an interview and lie through his teeth and berate a journalist for asking a question that any credible journalist would have asked and accuse him of doing someone’s “bidding”, of course you’re dealing with politics of the most base sort. It is beyond reasonable dispute that President Clinton failed miserably in dealing with Osama bin Laden in particular and international terrorism in general. But that really isn’t the point. The point is that we have to openly acknowledge what we did right and what we did wrong so that we can do more of the rights things and fewer of the wrong things. We can’t do that so long as Bill Clinton is more interested in burnishing his legacy and keeping the field clear for his wife’s Presidential ambitions. We can’t do that while people are more interested in winning a seat or two in the House or Senate rather than trying to figure out how to kill the enemy and clear the snakepits of the Middle East of the snakes.

I’m sick to death of it. I can’t imagine annything like this happening in World War I or World War II. I know there was some resistance to fighting the war, even after Pearl Harbor, but there was nothing like this. I can not recall a time in our history when we were as squeamish about defeating our foes as we are now, no time when we were so hisitant to get bloodied in order to protect the innocence. We have put personal gain and temporary political power above the very survival of our nation and, folks, I can’t stand it anymore. It’s to the point where I can’t even watch the news because what I see disgusts me.

Victor Davis Hanson put out some interesting facts a couple days ago I think are worth noting:

Today I finish the last class of a five-week course I taught this late summer at Hillsdale College on World War II. What is striking is the abrupt end of the war, whose last months nevertheless saw the worst American casualties in Europe of the entire struggle. 10,677 of our soldiers died in April 1945 alone, just a few days before the collapse of the Nazi regime— about the same number lost a year earlier during the month of June in the 1944 landings at Normandy and the slogging in the Hedgerows. Okinawa saw our worst casualties on the ground in the Pacific—and was declared secure only 6 weeks before the Japanese surrender. 1945 was far bloodier than 1939, a reminder that in the midst of a war daily losses are not necessarily a barometer of how close or far away is the end of the carnage. Ask the Red Army for whom the final siege of Berlin—361, 367 Russian and Polish soldiers lost—may have been their worst single battle of their entire war, itself characterized by killing on a scale unimaginable in the West.

Can you imagine the cry if we lost 10,000 soldiers in one month in Iraq? Can you imagine the “pull them out now” cries? I certainly can’t, because it’s never been part of our mainstream American nature until now. But what motivates the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin and Jack Murtha isn’t concern for the troops – they liken them to crazed murderers and the cruel thugs of Pol Pot and Josef Stalin. Their concern is that as we continue to kill the enemy in great numbers with very light losses of our own, their own political fortunes are dwindling. They cannot abide that so they mount ridiculous attacks, aided by an MSM that would rather print press releases than do honest and difficult journalism, designed to make themselves look heroic and the President dastardly.

Enough is enough. I can’t stomach what our politics has become. I can’t bear to watch another Richard Armitage throw his former coworkers under a train so he could look like an angel. I’m tired of the President having to waste time dealing with half-baked rumors and back-room whisperings instead of fighting this war with his whole strength. Innocent people all over the world are dying at the hands of thorough and unrepentant killers while we play our silly games of personal enrichment. The dead of 9/11 are still crying or from their graves for us to take seriously the ideology that murdered them while our colleges coddle professors who say that our government killed them.

Islamists have been killing us for twenty years and we’re still more concerned with what political party holds the majority in Congress. I’m sick and tired of it. I wonder how many more Americans have to die before the rest of us get sick and tired of it, too.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Political Pontifications