Democrats Undermine America,Yet Again
By Ted Baiamonte Comments: bje1000@aol.com (12/10/05)
It may not be correct to say that Bush lied about the rationale for getting us in to this war but it is fair to say he was very stupid not to verify the intelligence he used to get us into this war. This obvious truth is ignored by the Democrats simply because it is too complicated to talk about to the mass audience to which they must speak if they are to make political inroads.
When Colin Powell went before the UN and the world to present the definitive evidence for war he might have said: "Sorry folks, I thought we had good WMD evidence; I'll be back when it's verified." To verify it they might have sent a Special Forces team to, for example, bring back a piece of the so called mobile chemical weapon truck. Or, when Hans Blick, the UN weapons inspector, who was operating in Iraq at the time, said to us, "if you're so sure they have WMD, then tell us where they are and we'll go look at your evidence," Bush should have been able to tell him where to look or should have been patient enough to let Blick look a while longer on his own.
Bush did not bother to verify the intelligence because he was very eager to attack. He wanted to preemptively attack in the wake of 9/11 because Iraq was then a far more obvious target than Afghanistan ever was, and Afghanistan had already attacked us. But, this logic was too complicated for Bush to successfully explain to a mass audience so he fell back on the simplistic but compelling WMD argument, just as the Democrats are now falling back on the simplistic "liar" argument rather than attempting the complex but honest argument that Bush was merely too eager.
In sum, what we have is a marginally functioning democracy wherein complex foreign policy issues are manipulatively presented for analysis, by comparatively intelligent politicians, to an absurdly large and incompetent electorate. The situation is so bad that close to a majority now form their opinions from listening to comedians like Jon Stewart and Al Franken. The distance from ignorant to violent is short as we see every time lawyer and best selling author Ann Coulter tries to speak and is shouted down with the now famous Democratic chant, "you suck, you suck".
Of course, we must blame the Democrats for this dramatic contribution to the growing destruction of our democracy. It is they who have, since the Age of Jackson, sought to blatantly contravene the wisdom of our framers by enfranchising more and more people who are less and less competent. There is no greater modern Democratic offender than Hillary Clinton who, through her "make every vote count " initiative, has used her pre-presidential clout in an attempt to enfranchise every convicted felon to vote, for Democrats. Somehow she knows criminals are Democrats?
Interestingly though, Iraq and the "religious right" are cases, among others, where Bush and Rove have been able to use the large incompetent electorate against the Democrats who thought they had created it for their own exclusive ends. In any case, the future looks ominous indeed as the country becomes more and more democratic and concomitantly more and more incompetent. The possibility of turning back the suffrage clock and moving the intellectual clock forward, as per the wisdom of our framers, seems near zero. Democracy has run amok. The intelligence, veracity, integrity, and free speech rights of politicians and others can be challenged at will while the equally significant electorate is absolutely free of such challenges. The ship has sailed, and the Democrats mistakenly think they are the only ones on board. Our best hope is that the political intellectual class remains sufficiently vital and influential such that the choices that they ultimately present to the electorate for "analysis" are legitimate, but this is not a fall back position that our framers envisioned.
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