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| Steyn: Light bulbs that don't signify ideas |
| 2007-04-29 |
| After an intro citing Barack Obama's statement in the debates that he and his family were "working on" changing all their lightbulbs to save the environment, and a detour through Vladimir Putin's opposition to the U.S. proposals for an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe, Steyn delivers his main point: The Defeaticrats are being opportunist: They think they can calibrate the precise degree of U.S. defeat in Mesopotamia that will bring victory for them in Ohio and Florida. Contemptible as this is, it wouldn't be possible had the administration not lost the support of many of the American people over this war. The losses are devastating for the individuals' families but they are historically among the lowest in any conflict this nation or any other has fought. So I don't believe the nightly plume of smoke over Baghdad on the evening news explains the national disenchantment. Rather, the mission as framed by the president -- help the Iraqi people build a free and stable Iraq -- is simply not accepted by the American people. On the right, between the unrealpolitik "realists" and the "rubble doesn't cause trouble" isolationists and the hit-'em-harder-faster crowd, the president has fewer and fewer takers for a hunkered-down, defensive, thankless semi-colonial policing operation. Regardless of how it works on the ground, it has limited appeal at home. Meanwhile, the leftists don't accept it because, while they're fond of "causes," they dislike those that require meaningful action: Ask Tibetans about how effective half a century of America's "Free Tibet" campaign has been; or ask Darfuris, assuming you can find one still breathing, how the left's latest fetishization is going from their perspective: "On Sunday, April 29, Salt Lake Saves Darfur invites the greater Salt Lake community of compassion to join with us as we honor the fallen and suffering Darfuris in a day of films, discussion and dance with a Sudanese dance troupe." Marvelous. I hope as the "Salt Lake Saves Darfur" campaign intensifies in the decades ahead there'll be enough Darfuris to man the dance troupe. It would be truer to say that the greater Salt Lake community of compassion, like Sen. Obama with his light bulbs, is "working on" saving Darfur. In Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere, the world's mischief-makers have reached their own conclusions about how much serious "work" America is prepared to do. RTWT... |
| Posted by:Dave D. |