Lt. General Pacepa is Owed an Apology.

Mahablog responds to today’s earlier column from Lt. Gen. Pacepa in best leftist tradition of not bothering to address the actual points he made and making up strawmen to bludgeon. Worse, she slurs him as a lover of tyranny not once but twice in a stretch of the imagination so wild that it should be featured on “Animal Planet”.

She sums up the piece this way:

Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, a self-described “old KGB hand,” says liberals are destroying America.

Strawman much?

That’s not what he said, even a little bit. Nowhere in his column will you find the word “liberals” used anywhere. Pacepa refers to “…Mr. Bush’s domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain…”. Does that apply to “all liberals”? Hardly. It’s ridiculous to contend otherwise.

Strawman Part Two:

I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a “liar,” a “deceiver” and a “fraud.”

Again, it’s not hard to figure out which leaders he’s talking about and that’s his point. He’s not attempting to indict “liberals”. He’s aiming at certain behaviors by certain political leaders. He proves it by naming a few.

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America’s commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O’Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a “deserter.” And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, “Give Bush the Boot.”

No one can honestly say that Pacepa meant “liberals” when he said “partisans” nor when he criticized specific people unless you’re just trying to hammer the column into your own pre-generated narrative. Pacepa wrote an eminently reasonable column about specific behaviors by specific political leaders. Now, Maha may dispute those particular examples (and I have no doubt that she does). Unfortunately she couldn’t be bothered. She decided instead to write an new Pacepa column in her head and attack that. I suppose if the “righties” don’t conform to your sad and cynical worldview, you have to overwrite reality so that they do.

Making up strawmen is an old trick but we’re too smart to fall for it – conservatives and a good number of liberals alike. That’s why Congress’ approval ratings are diving toward the single digits (and are already there when it comes to Iraq). They’re sick and tired of the permanently venomous, constantly partisan lies spouted by the so-called “reality-based community”. They’re tired of people whose reality is wholly invented every time they wake up in the morning. They’re tired of the people who gargle with hate and shower with bitterness. They’re bone-weary of those who can’t stand that America is not the groaning cesspool of fascism they so want it to be just so they can play Hero of the Oppressed. Folks like Maha are going to screw around long enough that the American people are going to throw them so far out of the political process that it’ll be decades before they find their way back. It’s old and it’s tired and we, quite honestly, have had it. I know it sounds like I’m angry and I am, a little. I just can’t find it in my heart to be very angry at folks like Maha, though I guarantee you they’re angry at me. That’s not a noble thing. I’m not a hero for laying my anger aside. I just don’t have room for it. About all I can summon for Maha is pity. I think it must be lonely having that shrill voice of outrage screaming in your head all the time. I wonder that she and those like her have not gone completely insane by now. I know that I would have.

Do you think I’m exaggerating about that shrill voice? Here’s how she sees Pacepa’s piece, in longer form:

Now, let’s see if we’ve got this straight. According to Pacepa, Americans must give their leaders unquestioned allegiance, because to do otherwise weakens the nation. Questioning Dear Leader is an act of subversion. This is unlike commmunists, who deified their own ruler. Oh, wait …

You read Pacepa’s column, right? Does he anywhere say that we should give the President unquestioning anything? No, he didn’t. She knows that, of course. She has to make up another strawman because she doesn’t dare take on the rather humble proposition that there are enemies out there in the world far more dangerous than imaginary jackbooted Rethuglicans and that a key to defeating them is a basic level of respect for our President and Commander-in-Chief. That’s not an outrageous proposition, no matter how badly Maha distorts it. But it has to be outrageous, verging on the tyrannical so she can get all fired up about it.

What I find most amazing, and what discredits Maha completely, is that she would dare say that a man who risked his life to escape from totalitarianism would ever suggest that we build a tyranny here. Pacepa knows far better than Maha about a “Dear Leader”. It was his entire profession until he escaped the despots of the Soviet Union and came to the land of unprecedented freedom. That this tired scrap of a soul could say with a straight face that Lt. General Pacepa, a man who spoke to tyrants on a regular basis, who was a leader of one of the most terrible organizations in the history of mankind, would bring that evil to America is shameful and disgusting. Think about the overwhelming arrogance contained in that paragraph. Maha owes Pacepa an apology, from the very bottom of her bitter heart. Yet she can not stop. Here’s how she closes the piece.

Bottom line: Righties hate our freedoms. Right wingers hunger and thirst for authoritarianism, because real freedom scares them witless. They’re happier with a dictator telling them what to do, and they’re too cowardly to admit it.

I don’t know what to do here, folks. You can either consider what the man who fled a tyranny he knew intimately because he helped to build it or you can believe a woman who believes that same man wants to impose that very same tyranny on all of us. Choose comity, unity, and victory or despair, rage, and fantasy. The choice is, as always, yours.

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Category: Moonbat Nonsense