Suicidal hypocrisy
By Thomas E. Brewton
web posted September 18, 2006
Liberals have enjoyed the convenience of calling for shifting American troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, where terrorist action was much less until recent dates. That stance has been a good way to camouflage defeatist appeasement with a phony national-security firmness.
The Associated Press, for example, quotes socialist candidate Ned Lamont as saying in New Haven that, "We have sacrificed our daughters and sons and our treasure in a war we didn't have to fight ..... We have ignored the real threats and security needs in the war we should be fighting, the one against the terrorists. ... Senator Lieberman believes that President Bush has it right in Iraq. I believe that he's dangerously wrong..... "Today we have five times as many troops in Iraq as we have in Afghanistan," [Lamont] said. "We spend more in a month in Iraq than we do in a year in Afghanistan. These decisions are wrong and they have left us less safe."
Evidently the "fight against the terrorists" boils down to nothing more than having troops in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, because liberals oppose all measures to combat terrorism through CIA, NSA, and FBI surveillance and interrogation.
Another possibility is that the liberals want to make their version of the "fight against the terrorists" into a way for tort-bar lawyers to replace revenues lost from the Federal clampdown on fraudulent securities and asbestos litigation. That's vital, of course, as the tort bar, along with socialist teachers' unions, are the big money sources for liberal political campaigns.
Liberals have long insisted that combating terrorism be simply an extension of after-the-fact criminal prosecution, rather than truly effective preventive action. What a delicious prospect for liberal candidates and their tort-bar henchmen: years of litigation, funded by Amnesty International, to represent terrorist prisoners who have been deprived of their 14th Amendment rights!
Mr. Lamont and his fellow socialist candidates have endlessly cudgeled President Bush for fomenting terrorism by our presence in Iraq, while failing to pour troops into Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden. Among other inconsistencies, that "plan" requires ignoring the probability that bin Laden is in neighboring Pakistan, where officials have flatly refused to permit U.S. troops to operate.
Now, with strikingly bad timing, terrorism has re-heated with a bang in Afghanistan and is blowing the socialists' cover. Moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is, at the moment, merely a matter of which frying pan to use.
Are the liberal-socialists going to show their true flag, the red banner of the socialist international, and call for completing President Clinton's down-sizing of the military? Why stop, as President Clinton did, at cutting the military more than a third? Will they admit that their version of the "fight against the terrorists" means handing our national defense over to a UN dominated by nations whose foreign policy objectives are reduction of our wealth and power?
Are they going to level with the American people that what they really want is to impeach George W. Bush, rescind tax cuts (thereby plunging the economy into recession), and finish Senator Hillary Clinton's 1993 project to enfold the entire health-care system into a copy of tightly-rationed Canadian and British socialized health care?
Worry not. If the socialists take charge of Congress in November, we will have the comfort of knowing that, when Muslim jihadists resume slaughtering us here at home, socialized medicine will be there for us, should any of us survive the many months of waiting time for treatment. We can warm our hearts with the knowledge that, when our turns finally come up, we will all be equally poorly cared for.
The good news about liberal-socialism is that, having been rendered defenseless by further military cutbacks and diplomatic appeasement, we won't have to endure the onslaught too long. Bin Laden's boys can decapitate us with less waiting time than for socialized medicine. 
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. His weblog is The View From 1776.