It is hard for people who live in an opinion balloon to see that they do. All they see is what's inside the balloon. The current case is the relentless, daily media and political assault on American prosecution of the war in Iraq, and, really, all parts of the war on terrorists. The innuendo, the mood, the leitmotif of every single day's newspaper and broadcast is that America is in a hopeless war in which our very involvement is both imprudent and immoral, and that Americans' rights (thanks to the Patriot Act, etc.) are being undermined, as are the human rights of accused terrorists. There is no satisfaction in these quarters when criminal terrorists are captured, tried and convicted. Those are small stories and almost insignificant. The same goes for U.S. achievements in battle in Iraq and Afghanistan. The major success in Somalia has been nearly ignored.
And there is no alternative scenario. Once we stop going after terrorists, they, presumably will just go away.
One of the oddities is that when American troops kill terrorists the new stories sometimes only refer to them as "Iraqis", or even "civilians", or maybe "suspected terrorists." As mentioned before in this space, days when there is no news of American deaths in Baghdad should be noteworthy; but they are ignored.
Ours is a civilization increasingly manipulated by people on the cultural left who disapprove of it profoundly. They have support in the media, academia, the foundations, the courts and even the bureaucracy. But they are all living in a balloon, a kind of malign Truman Show. They are not willing to confront the real challenge--well-funded and varied forms of Islamist extremism--so they turn on their own government and society, a target they can't miss. Their government and fellow Americans don't fight back the way the real enemy does. So, if you lack the resolve and courage to criticize the true foe, criticize the people who do fight them. It's like a scene where neighbors attack the firefighters trying to put out a house fire, or the occasional incidence of swimmers heedlessly grabbing hold of a lifeguard who is trying to rescue people in the water. Odd, perverse, but it does happen.
Senator Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut, alluded to this perversity in a speech just made to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (brought to my attention by Peter Wehner in the White House). Contrary to his recent press treatment, Sen. Lieberman has long been a staunch Democrat, and a real partisan when he ran for Vice President with Al Gore. But we are at war. He knows it. He is not confused about the difference between the fireman and the fire.
"There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism. There is something profoundly wrong when there is so much distrust of our intelligence community that some Americans doubt the plain and ominous facts about the threat to us posed by Iran. And there is something profoundly wrong when, in the face of attacks by radical Islam, we think we can find safety and stability by pulling back, by talking to and accommodating our enemies, and abandoning our friends and allies. Some of this wrong-headed thinking about the world is happening because we're in a political climate where, for many people, when George Bush says "yes," their reflex reaction is to say "no." That is unacceptable."
