HYSTERICAL WOMEN

Liberals are perennially enraged that Republicans are allowed to talk back. For years, this wasn't a problem, because, in Lenin's immortal words, they had seized the telegraph office. There were only three TV stations, three major newspapers, and a handful of national magazines, all run by liberals. But at least since Rush Limbaugh got a microphone, liberals haven't been able to make arguments in a vacuum. The Left's long-running monologue had become a dialogue, and they didn't like it one bit. So now they constantly try to re-create a world where they can hurl slander and treason without anyone arguing back. They needed a doctrine of infallibility.

The appearance of Fox News Channel nearly drove liberals berserk: they were supposed to control 100 percent of news dissemination. When conservatives used to criticize the media, liberals always acted perplexed and indignant at the idea that a TV

station could have a political bias. Then Fox News came along, and to listen to liberals, you'd think we were living in a police state. Fox News isn't even particularly conservative, though it is recognizably American. I believe the one verified atrocity committed by Fox News was the wearing of American flag lapel pins by some anchors after 9/11. Assuming—against all evidence—that Fox News is every bit as conservative as CBS is liberal, it is still just a small beach-head in a universe of liberal-speak. But the mere existence of one solitary network that doesn't toe the party line has driven the Left insane. Liberals have made documentaries attacking Fox News, written books denouncing Fox News, screamed about "lying liars" on Fox News, and established websites to document the cruel deceptions of Fox News.

The result of all this glandular hysteria is: The five top-rated cable news shows are all on Fox News. Bill O'Reilly has more than 3 million viewers a night, while CNN viewers are measured in the hundreds of thousands and MSNBC by the occasional show of hands.

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Still, the establishment news shows on ABC and NBC have more than 10 million viewers apiece—yet another tribute to the overwhelming power of inertia. Even the fake news on CBS has more than 7 million viewers. Brit Hume gets a lousy million viewers and liberals think it's fascism in America.

Inconsolable over the death of the old media, liberals told us that the nation was being torn apart by "angry voices," "polarizing rhetoric," "angry white men," "the politics of division." They said the nation has never been so divided, forgetting the somewhat polarized era America experienced between 1861 and 1865. Then people remembered the sweetness and light we got from liberals during, say, Water-gate or the Bork hearings, when they had total control of the media. Liberals' idea of harmony is: Democrats win everything all the time and no one else can talk.

Next Democrats tried explaining that they were being shellacked by the superior media savvy and rhetorical skills of Republicans—like that silver-tongued devil George W. Bush. They said their ideas were too complex to fit on a bumper sticker. This is crazy.

"I [heart] partial birth abortion" fits quite easily. They said they just needed to retool their message, formulate winning sound bites, and talk about "God's green Earth" and maybe Democrats wouldn't keep frightening people. But the retooling didn't work. It turned out it really was the Democrats' message that Americans hated.

Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to. That's why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can't respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven't changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokes-men are people with "absolute moral authority"—Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, a terminal illness, or as a last resort, being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela. Like Oprah during Sweeps Week, liberals have come to rely exclusively on people with sad stories to improve their Q rating. They've become the

"Lifetime" TV network of political parties. Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month's purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.

One way or another, the Bush administration was heartless for responding whenever it was attacked. It was cruel to respond to Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, leading Cindy to become a rabid anti-war protester. Sheehan called Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," a "fuhrer," an "evil maniac," and a "filth-spewer." But according to liberals, no one was allowed to sound a note of dissent—because Sheehan lost a son in Iraq. It was treason to respond to Joe Wilson, who accused the Bush administration of lying about the case for war with Iraq based on Wilson's trip to Niger. Wilson called Bush a "liar" and Cheney a "lying son of a bitch."' But no one could say Wilson's alleged expertise was based on a nepotistic junket he was sent on because his wife worked at the CIA.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times made the point plainly by comparing Sheehan to Joe Wilson, saying, "The Bush team tried to discredit `Mom' [Sheehan] by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him." One wonders how exposing anything about Cindy could discredit her more than the poor imbecile's own words have.

In addition to Sheehan and Wilson, over the last few years the Democrats have used: 68

• a grieving Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was murdered by a lunatic on the Long Island Rail Road, to lobby for gun control

• a paralyzed, dying Christopher Reeve to argue for embryonic stem-cell research

• a gaggle of weeping widows to blame President Bush for 9/11

• a disabled Vietnam veteran, Max Cleland, to attack the Iraq war and call Bush, Cheney, and every other human who ever disagreed with him a "chicken hawk"

• a rare Democratic Purple Heart recipient, Congressman John Murtha, to argue for surrender in Iraq

In all these cases, Democrats took the position that the spokes-person immunized the message from criticism, no matter how vicious or insane it was. Former New Republic editor and gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan brandished the openly gay chaplain to New York City's firemen, who himself died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, in his ongoing, nonstop argument for gay priests. The chaplain died on 9/11, therefore the pope should back off.

Democrats will even use our own people against us! After Democrats claimed Barry Goldwater was clinically insane when he was the Republican candidate for president, as soon as he went senile and started attacking the "religious right," he became a conservative oracle for the media. Reagan aide James Brady was respected by liberals only after he was shot in the head by John Hinckley and became a spokesman for gun control groups. Back when Nancy Reagan was consulting an astrologer about Reagan's schedule after he was shot by

Hinckley, liberals denounced her as a nut controlling the White House with a Ouija board. But after Reagan died of Alzheimer's disease and Nancy expressed support for embryonic stem-cell research, liberals anointed her Seer of Technology. I can't think of a single ex-ample of conservatives doing this. Far from trying to prevent liberals from responding, we enjoy watching liberals try to mount a counterargument—especially in the case of Cindy Sheehan, with that weird disconnect between the viciousness of her comments and her itsybitsy, squeaky voice.

After 9/11, four housewives from New Jersey whose husbands died in the attack on the World Trade Center became media heroes for blaming their husbands' deaths on George Bush and demanding a commission to investigate why Bush didn't stop the attacks. Led by all-purpose scold Kristen Breitweiser, the four widows came to be known as "the Jersey Girls." (Original adorable name: "Just Four Moms from New Jersey.") The Jersey Girls weren't interested in national honor, they were interested in a lawsuit. They first came together to complain that the $1.6 million average settlement to be paid to 9/11

victims' families by the government was not large enough.

After getting their payments jacked up, the weeping widows took to the airwaves to denounce George Bush, apparently for not beaming himself through space from Florida to New York and throwing him-self in front of the second building at the World Trade Center. These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an at-tack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV

and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-69

arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.

The increasingly rabid widows demanded a commission to investigate why the FAA didn't realize, when it first received word about a "hijacking," that this was part of a monstrous terrorist attack involving four commercial planes about to be turned into cruise missiles. On Donahue, Breitweiser said, "I'd like to know how our Pentagon, which is the home of our Defense Department, was hit an hour and 45 minutes after the air traffic controllers knew that they had airliners up that were hijacked. I don't understand how that's possible."2 It wasn't even an hour and 45 minutes between the first plane taking off from Logan Airport and the third plane crashing into the Pentagon.

American Airlines Flight 11 took off at 7:59 A.M., so obviously nobody knew at 7:59

that any planes were off-course, much less about to attack the nation. Air traffic controllers in Boston first notified higher-ups that Flight 11 had been hijacked at 8:25.

That plane crashed into the World Trade Center at 8:46—with F-15 fighter jets in hot pursuit. At 8:47 A.M., the FAA first received notice that United Airlines Flight 175 out of Boston was behaving abnormally. Minutes later, unbeknownst to the FAA, American Airlines Flight 77 was hi-jacked and diverted toward the Pentagon. At 9:03, Flight 175

crashed into the second World Trade Center building, at which point we knew the nation was under attack. Even after it was clear that an attack was under way, there was no way of knowing which of the thousands of other planes in U.S. airspace at the time, if any, was going to crash next, much less where such a crash might occur. The FAA grounded all domestic flights at 9:26 A.M., and at 9:37 A.M. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

The 9/11 Commission became the Jersey Girls' pet project. Breitweiser said, "We simply wanted to know why our husbands were killed," and "why they went to work one day and didn't come back."4 Oddly enough, "swarthy Muslim beasts flew planes into our sky-scrapers" did not appear to be one of the possible answers. They demanded a commission to investigate—much as wives of the dead at Pearl Harbor demanded commissions to investigate FDR throughout World War II.

We're already paying the salaries of 535 members of a standing bipartisan commission, which is called "the U.S. Congress." But by establishing an "independent"

commission, the Democrats were able to ensure a whitewash of Clinton's utter incompetence, cowardice, and capitulation to enemy regimes whose princes might be rich enough to write checks to the Clinton presidential library, during the eight years leading up to 9/11.

The commission consisted of five members chosen by congressional Democrats, four members chosen by congressional Republicans, and the chairman chosen by President Bush. While the Republicans picked gutless moderate Republicans like Slade Gorton and Thomas Kean, Democrats named liberal attack dogs like Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor who testified in defense of perjury and obstruction of justice during Clinton's impeachment hearings, and Jamie Gorelick, Clinton's deputy attorney general and the chief architect of the policies that prevented the FBI from unraveling the 9/11

plot before it happened. That's "bipartisan" in Washington.

This would be like a commission on henhouse management with the Republicans carefully choosing well-credentialed hens and the Democrats sending in bloodthirsty foxes. During the commission's "investigation," Clinton's former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was caught secreting Clinton-era documents out of the National 70

Archives by stuffing them in his pants and socks. Leave it to a Clinton lackey like Berger to turn a probe of the worst terrorist attack in history into an episode of Get Smart. Sandy Burglar later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to community service and ordered to pay more than $50,000.

The Democrats treated the 9/11 Commission as one more battle-field in their ongoing war with Republicans, while bewildered Republicans looked on helplessly. For Democrats, everything is political—Coretta Scott King's funeral, Paul Wellstone's memorial, a Dixie Chicks concert. They will turn a major national disaster like a hurricane breaking the levees in New Orleans into a political football. Republicans demanded that President Richard Nixon resign for one lie; Democrats went to war to defend President Clinton for a mountain of lies and felonies, with not one Democrat voting to remove Clinton from office. Even the Supreme Court was shocked by this: In a breathtaking rebuke, not a single justice attended Clinton's next State of the Union address, not even the justices Clinton had appointed. Speaking of which: When a Democrat is in the White House, Republican senators vote by huge majorities to confirm extreme left-wing lawyers to the Supreme Court, such as former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg. When a Republican is president, Democratic senators turn every Supreme Court nomination—even lower court appointments—into Armageddon.

Conforming to pattern, when a commission was convened to investigate intelligence failures that preceded 9/11, Republicans mistakenly imagined that the purpose of the commission was to investigate intelligence failures, not to be a partisan game for the Democrats to rewrite history.

The only valuable information about government failures leading to 9/11 has come out in the press, not the commission report.

The "Clinton Whitewash Commission" covered up a classified military data-mining project known as "Able Danger," for example. The Able Danger intelligence operation was said to have identified Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, and perhaps three other hijackers, more than a year before the attack—in other words, back when you-know-who was president. The commission completely ignored this stunning information, almost as if they were trying to cover something up.

When the media got wind of Able Danger, long after the commission had completed its report, the Democratic co-chairman of the commission, Lee Hamilton, denied that they had heard anything about Able Danger. "The 9/11 commission," Hamilton said, "did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohamed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."5 A day or two later, Hamilton changed his story, admitting the commission had been told about Able Danger, but claimed they didn't mention it in their report because it was not "historically significant."6 (This time the word obviously was conspicuously absent from his prepared statement.)

Able Danger wasn't "historically significant" in the sense that the intelligence gathered by this operation did not stop the 9/11 attack. It could not have prevented the attack, because the information produced by Able Danger was destroyed by the Clinton administration.' So on Hamilton's theory, the only way for Able Danger to have been

"historically significant" is if the intelligence had prevented the at-tack, in which case there would have been no need for a 9/11 Commission. I think that's what the Commission was supposed to be looking for.

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The commission report was also short on information about the policy instituted by Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick—which is odd, since she was sitting right there on the commission, thanks to the Democrats. Gorelick had specifically prohibited intelligence agents from telling law enforcement agents about suspected terrorists in the country. Gorelick issued guidelines that—according to the words she wrote—"go beyond what is legally required." She said she erected the wall in order to be absolutely sure that any intelligence information gathered would be admissible at a later criminal trial. As terrorism prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says: "The object of a rational counterterrorism approach is to prevent mass murder from happening in the first place, not to improve your litigating posture for the indictment you return after thousands of people have been slaughtered." Apart from the Great Wall of China, the wall separating intelligence gathering from law enforcement is the only man-made structure on earth visible to space aliens.

Back when Clinton was protecting the nation with the able assistance of his deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, prosecutors and FBI agents were screaming from the rooftops that Gorelick's "wall" of separation between intelligence and law enforcement would lead to dead Americans. Mary Jo White, the Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, wrote a letter directly to Gorelick, warning, "The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary." White continued, "Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results." The commission received a copy of this letter to Gore-lick, but curiously did not see fit to include it in the final report.

Then–Attorney General John Ashcroft told the commission that the wall had prevented FBI agents from even being told 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were in the country until weeks before the attack. So 3,000 Americans are dead, but we can all rest easy: Nawaf's and Khalid's constitutional rights had been secured the day they flew a plane into the Pentagon. Ashcroft read a letter from an FBI agent to headquarters, angrily remarking that the Gore-lick guidelines were giving "the most protection" to Osama bin Laden. FBI headquarters responded, "We're all frustrated with this issue. These are the rules. [The FBI's National Security Law Unit] does not make them up. But somebody did make these rules. Somebody built this wall."

And the somebody who built the wall was a 9/11 commissioner chosen by the Democrats. Apart from the Wright brothers' invention of the airplane itself, no single innovation was more responsible for the 9/11 attacks than Gorelick's decision to put up this wall. And yet Gorelick was never called upon to explain why department guidelines ever should have gone beyond what the (literally) suicidal law required. The 9/11

Commission report barely mentioned the wall. Perhaps it, too, was deemed "historically insignificant." Instead of calling Gorelick as a witness, the 9/11 Commission wasted the time of cur-rent administration officials in the middle of a war, demanding that they testify to well-known events.

The 9/11 Commission was a scam and a fraud, the sole purpose of which was to cover up the disasters of the Clinton administration and distract the nation's leaders during wartime. Not only did the Jersey Girls claim credit for this Clinton whitewash machine, they spent most of the hearings denouncing the Bush administration for not stopping the 9/11 attack from the weak position handed it by the Clinton administation.

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Specific policies of the Clinton administration were all but designed to ensure that the 9/11 attacks could not be stopped. "Just Four Moms from New Jersey" were satisfied knowing that Clinton felt their pain. That was all that mattered.

In an interview with Deborah Norville about Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Jersey Girl Breitweiser complained: "[R]eally, she spent the day just saying that, `No, I didn't do anything wrong. No one asked me to do this. How would I know?' " In the same interview, Jersey Girl Patty Casazza demanded to know why Rice didn't stop the attack on the basis of the now-famous Au-gust 6 "PDB," or Presidential Daily Briefing. Casazza said the August PDB "certainly stated that Osama bin Laden was all set to do an at-tack on the homeland here in the United States," and "with that information, I don't know how you wouldn't have, you know, put up a better defense."8

If this PDB was so important, why has the media shied away from printing it? The New York Times never had room, just one day, to print the entire PDB? All you ever hear about is the title: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." (Midwest Girl Determined to Succeed in Hollywood.) In fact, the full PDB is a Cliffs Notes history lesson on al Qaeda.

It reads like a homework assignment that should have been done earlier but wasn't and instead got quickly cobbled together at midnight by hitting the encyclopedia: "[Bin Laden] prepares operations years in advance and is not deterred by setbacks."9 And there you have it! The entire 9/11 plot!

Indeed, all the information about bin Laden in the August PDB comes from the nineties. Not one fact in the PDB is more recent than 1999. Thus, for example, the memo recites these facts:

• "Bin Ladin [sic] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S."

• "The millennium plotting in Canada in 1999 may have been part of Bin Ladin's first serious attempt to implement a terrorist strike in the U.S."

• "Two al-Qaeda members found guilty in the conspiracy to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were U.S. citizens and a senior EIJ (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) member lived in California in the mid-1990's."

While the PDB had a lot of old news about bin Laden, it didn't have much to say about his future plans. Even if the memo's stale information had been recast in the form of urgent warnings—rather than as factual data from a boring book report—the PDB did not predict one single fact about the 9/11 attack. There is nothing in the memo that could possibly have prevented 9/11.

The four statements in the PDB hinting at al Qaeda's future operations were these:

"CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the U.S. planning attack with explosives."

The 9/11 attack did not involve explosives.

"We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a [redacted] service in 1998 saying that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the re-lease of `Blind Shaykh' Ùmar àdb at-Rahman and other U.S.-

held extremists."

The 9/11 attack was not an attempt to ransom the Blind Sheik or any other Muslim terrorists, which would have required taking live hostages, not just killing a lot of people 73

by crashing the planes.

"FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The 9/11 attack did not target any federal buildings in New York. "A clandestine source said in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks."

None of the nineteen hijackers were youths recruited from a bin Laden cell in New York.

If the entire federal government had gone on Red Alert in response to the August 6

PDB, FBI agents would have been rousting suspected terrorists in Queens and looking for swarthy men in U-Haul trucks outside the federal courthouse in New York. In theory, they might also have instituted racial profiling at airport security, which would have prevented both the hostage-taking mentioned in the August PDB and the actual 9/11

attack. Liberals won't let us do this after 9/11; they certainly wouldn't have let us do it before 9/11.

So besides a general historical review of al Qaeda (noun, Arabic for "the base,"

terrorist group formed in 1980s that seeks to attack the U.S.) based on information known since at least 1999, the few bits of information about future attacks contained nothing of relevance to the actual attack.

Why didn't the media ever see fit to reveal the full text of the August 6 PDB? It's not as if this memo wasn't being used to bash the administration. The media deliberately prevented Americans from seeing the memo in order to attack Condoleezza Rice for saying the document contained only "historical information"—which it did.

Of course, there were clues about what the famous PDB contained. When Richard Ben-Veniste interrogated Condoleezza Rice about the PDB during the 9/11 Commission hearings—wasting the time of the president's national security adviser in wartime—he nearly had to pull out a bullhorn to prevent Rice from revealing its contents: BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB.

RICE: I believe the title was "Bin Laden Determined to Attack In-side the United States." Now, the .. .

BEN-VENISTE: Thank you.

RICE: No, Mr. Ben-Veniste, you .. .

BEN-VENISTE: I will get into the .. .

RICE: I would like to finish my point here.

BEN-VENISTE: I didn't know there was a point. I asked you what the title was.

RICE: You asked me whether or not it warned of attacks.

BEN-VENISTE: I asked you what the title was.

RICE: You said did it not warn of attacks? It did not warn of attacks inside the United States. It was historical information, based on old reporting. There was no new threat information, and it did not, in fact, warn of any coming attacks inside the United States.

This enraged the Jersey Girls. How dare Rice deny that the 9/11 plot had been laid 74

out plainly in a document that issued such clarion warnings as "Bin Laden associates surveilled our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam as early as 1993, and some members of the Nairobi cell planning the bombing were arrested and deported in 1997."

Obviously, this meant nineteen Muslim men were going to wrest control of four commercial aircraft flying out of Boston's Logan Airport, Washington's Dulles Airport, and New Jersey's Newark Air-port on the morning of September 11 and fly the planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Why wouldn't Rice admit she could have stopped the 9/11 attack and saved Kristen Breitweiser's husband?

Mostly the Witches of East Brunswick wanted George Bush to apologize for not being Bill Clinton. Like Monica Lewinsky before her, Breitweiser found impeached president Clinton "very forthcoming." She also found the flamboyant Bush-basher Richard Clarke "very forthcoming." Miss Va-Va Voom of 1968 seemed to think the 9/11

Commission was her nationally televised personal therapy session and as long as government officials issued fake apologies, she could have "closure." (One shudders to imagine how Clinton ministers to four widows.) The rest of the nation was more interested in knowing why the FBI was prevented from being given intelligence about 9/11 terrorists here in the United States more than a year before the attack and would have liked to have top government officials back on the job preventing the next terrorist attack rather than participating in a charade intended to exonerate the Clinton administration.

Needless to say, the Democrat ratpack gals endorsed John Kerry for president. Most audaciously, they complained about the Bush campaign using images from the 9/11

attack in campaign ads, calling it "political propaganda"13—which was completely different from the "Just Four Moms from New Jersey" cutting campaign commercials for Kerry. And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy.

Other weeping widows began issuing rules about what could be done at Ground Zero in New York City. This is among the contributing factors to the fact that it's been five years since the 9/11 attack and Ground Zero is still just a big empty plot of ground in the most dynamic city in the world. Five years after Pearl Harbor, we had won WWII, fielded armies on two continents, and developed the atom bomb. Construction workers cleaned up the entire World Trade Center site—1.8 million tons of rubble, 16 acres wide, seven stories high, and 70 feet below ground—months ahead of schedule. But since then, the site has remained unchanged, while family members squabble about what may be built on the "sacred" ground. You have to shut down the No. 1 train because it reminds me of my husband! If FDR had had to put up with this, no planes would ever have been allowed to fly over Hawaii again. Surely, there can be a proper memorial without leaving the footprints empty. The British burned the Capitol and the White House in the War of 1812. If we'd been smart, those are the places we would have left empty.

A lot of widows support Bush—a lot support Pat Buchanan. But they were not trying to convert their personal tragedy into a weapon to dictate national policy or redesign lower Manhattan. None of the weeping widows issuing demands, I note, were firemen's wives. And how about we hear from some wives of proud fighting Marines? While these 75

professional 9/11 victims turned themselves into the arbiters of what anyone could say about 9/11, some poor woman in Astoria, Queens, was being told her husband died in a car accident. She won't be paid millions of dollars, feted in Vanity Fair, or granted federal commissions to investigate why her husband died.

It's especially odd having the angry 9/11 widows fawned over by the same political party that objects to crime victims' delivering victim impact statements. From now on, when someone's loved one is killed by a criminal and given a reduced sentence by a liberal judge, can that judge be hauled before a committee of the family?

ANOTHER Democrat who used a tragedy that befell a mate to end an argument was the biggest drama queen of them all: Joseph C. Wilson IV. Wilson is the ne'er-do-well, unemployed WASP who claimed to be a Bush insider accusing the president of lying about prewar intelligence on Iraq. Wilson's prior work experience consisted of drifting through some low-level positions at U.S. embassies over the years until reaching the pinnacle of his career: Ambassador to Gabon. Wilson insists on being called

"Ambassador."

Wilson thrust himself on the nation in July 2003. He wrote an op-ed for the New York Times claiming Bush had lied in his State of the Union address when he said the famous "16 words": "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The British believed it then and believe it now. A bipartisan Senate Committee that conducted a painstaking investigation believes it. Why, even the French believe it! After Coalition forces conquered Iraq in seventeen days flat with amazingly few casualties, forcing liberals to carp about something other than the execution of the war, they became hysterical about the case for war. Consequently, the British government convened the Butler Commission to evaluate their government's prewar intelligence.

Among the commission's conclusions, released in 2004, was this: "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999" and that "the British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium."

But that's not how Wilson saw it. In 2002, he had been sent on an unpaid government make-work job to Niger to "investigate" whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger. Wilson's method of investigating consisted of sitting around cafes, asking African potentates questions like Did you commit a horrible crime, which, if so, would ruin your country's relationship with the United States? I have no independent means of corroborating this, so be honest! It seems not to have occurred to Wilson that his method of investigation might not be watertight. But on the basis of the answers he got, Wilson concluded that Saddam had not sought uranium ore from Niger.

The Senate Intelligence Committee later learned that Wilson's trip had unwittingly bolstered the case that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger. ( Joe Wilson seems to go through life doing things unwittingly.) Almost as an afterthought, Wilson had informed CIA employees that the former prime minister of Niger told him an Iraqi delegation had proposed "expanding commercial relations" with Niger. Since Niger's only major export is uranium, anyone who discusses "expanding commercial relations"

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with Niger is talking about buying uranium.

But Wilson was floored when he heard Bush's State of the Union address. Listening to Bush's speech, Wilson interpreted "Africa" to mean "Niger" and "British intelligence"

to mean "Joseph Wilson," and realized in horror that Bush must have been referring to Wilson's very own report!

Or at least that's what he realized soon after he started working for the Kerry campaign in May 2003. This was a fact the media seemed studiously uninterested in pursuing: Wilson's inadvertent ad-mission that he had begun advising the Kerry campaign one month before he started making his outlandish claims against the Bush ad-ministration. In October 2003, the Associated Press reported that Wilson said he had been "advising Kerry on foreign policy for about five months."14 That means he started working for Kerry in May 2003—a month before he wrote his New York Times op-ed titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

Out of love for his country and an insatiable desire to have some-one notice his worthless existence, Wilson wrote a column for the Times that called Bush a liar. His story was nutty enough to be believed by the entire New York Times editorial board.

Though Wilson's defenders later indignantly denied it, he had clearly implied in his op-ed that he had been sent to Niger at the be-hest of Vice President Dick Cheney and had reported back to him—which was certainly news to Cheney.

Among Wilson's other references to the high-level nature of his trip in his j'accuse column in the Times, he said:

• "I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report."

• "[A]gency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office." (Curiously, one

"agency official" also asked him to take out the trash and be home early for junior's T-ball game that night.)

• "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons pro-gram was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."15 (He neglected to mention that his "experience" with the Bush administration was limited to what he read in the Washington Post from his living room couch.)

True, Wilson never unequivocally stated that Cheney sent him to Niger or that he reported back to Cheney. But he sure as hell didn't say his wife had recommended him for the trip. With Wilson's encouragement, soon the entire press corps was reporting that Cheney had sent him to Niger and that Wilson's nonexistent "files" were sitting on Cheney's desk.

In short order, the White House was being forced to deny that the vice president had sent Wilson to Niger. CNN's White House correspondent Dana Bash querulously remarked that the White House "at this time" was "continuing to deny" that Cheney had

"ordered" Wilson to make the trip: "Now, with regard to ambassador Wilson's charge that it was actually the vice president's office that ordered him to go and that they did know 77

about his conclusion . . . administration officials are, at this time, flatly denying that. One official is telling CNN, quote, that they were, quote, ùnaware of the mission and unaware of the results or conclusion of his mission.' So this is some-thing that the White House is continuing to deny."16

ABC News reported, in a program objectively titled "Bush Administration Deceives America: President Used Known Falsehood to Lead Americans to War," that

"Ambassador Joe Wilson says, at the request of Vice President Cheney's office, the CIA sent him to Niger in February 2002.

Wilson not only failed to correct the media's mammoth misunderstanding about the genesis of his trip to Niger, but began claiming that the vice president was aware of his conclusions. On Meet the Press, Wilson said, "The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there."' Unless he was referring to the vice president of the Screen Actors Guild, this was preposterous. But Wilson assured the Washington Post—based on his insider knowledge, no doubt—"When you task a serious organization like the CIA to answer a question, it doesn't go into a black hole."79 It might go into a black hole, however, if you were sent by your wife.

The Washington Post reported that the Bush administration and British government had "ignored [Wilson's] findings" that "helped debunk claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium" from Niger.20 (This was about the same time the Bush administration

"ignored" my report that I was running low on dishwasher detergent.) The Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.) reported that Wilson went to Niger "at the request of Vice President Richard Cheney's office" and that Wilson said "he had files with the State Department, CIA and the vice president's office" saying there were no uranium sales to Iraq.21 Wilson had filed no written report, but suddenly his "files" were sitting on the vice president's desk.

The Daily Telegraph (London) went the whole nine yards, calling Wilson a "CIA man" and "a senior CIA envoy sent to investigate the claim" about Saddam seeking uranium. Wilson was finally "[b]reaking his silence" after being sent to Niger "on CIA orders"—that is, by his wife. According to the Telegraph, "Mr. Wilson said he believed that his conclusions would have been automatically shared with British officials."22 So now Wilson's nonexistent report was not only on Cheney's desk but had been wired to Tony Blair!

Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer called Wilson "the mysterious envoy"

sent to Niger "under pressure from Cheney" and claimed "Wilson reported back the facts to Cheney."23 And the Democrats' leading geopolitical strategist, Bianca Jagger, said,

"Ambassador Joseph Wilson" said "his report got to the State Department, to the White House, to the national security and that he believes that all of them should have that information, and that Vice President Cheney should have had that information."24

So don't tell me it wasn't relevant that Wilson had been recommended for the unpaid trip to Niger by his wife.

Soon journalist Robert Novak revealed in his July 14, 2003, syndicated column that Wilson did not go to Niger on a high-level CIA mission for Vice President Cheney, as Wilson had implied.25 Wilson spoke with no expertise, he was not a "CIA man," he was not sent by Dick Cheney, no one in the White House was ever told of Wilson's make-work "report." He had been sent by his wife, Valerie Plame, a chair-warmer at the CIA 78

who apparently wanted to get him out of the house. Wilson had never even filed any written report, but gave an "oral report" to a few CIA bureaucrats who came to his house—just before Wilson zoomed back to his Austin Powers fantasy camp.

In response to Novak's column, Wilson accused Karl Rove of outing his wife as an undercover "spy" to get her killed and retaliate against him. In the words of the Washington Post, Wilson believed his wife had been mentioned "to intimidate other government insiders from talking to journalists." Except Wilson wasn't an insider and his wife wasn't an undercover spy.

Liberals were allowed to boast that Wilson was sent "by the CIA" and "reported back" to Cheney. But—in the traditional liberal definition of criminal—Republicans were committing heinous crimes if they responded by pointing out that Wilson's trip was a boondoggle arranged by his wife. The man the Democrats wanted to be commander in chief, Senator John Kerry, said, "it's an àct of treason' to reveal the identity of intelligence sources." (Not as treasonous as calling your comrades in arms war criminals during the Vietnam War, but still, a pretty serious offense.) A sampling of headlines from various newspapers indicates the tenor of the coverage: SO NOW WE SELL OUT OUR OWN?

Santa Fe New Mexican, August 3, 2003

BLOWING CIA AGENT'S COVER WEAKENS NATIONAL SECURITY

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 30, 2003

BUSH ADMINISTRATION MUST BRING ROGUE OFFICIALS TO

JUSTICE; CIA AGENT OUTED FOR PARTISAN POLITICAL REASONS

News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington), October 1, 2003

EDITORIAL: BETRAYAL OF TRUST

Denver Post, October 2, 2003

CIA LEAK LOOSE-LIPPED LEAK

The Sunday Oregonian, October 5, 2003

DIRTY AND DEADLY

Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), October 26, 2003

DEFIANT NOVAK SHOULD BE INDICTED, TRIED FOR TREASON

Palm Beach Post (Florida), October 27, 2003

(Noticeably, none of the newspapers screaming about "treason" or "traitors" were papers like the Washington Post. For the really insane stuff you have to go to bush-league newspapers where reporters have all the venom of the big-city newspapers, combined with retard-level IQs.)

The real story about Joseph C. Wilson IV was not "Bush lied, kids died." It was that Wilson and his wife foisted their mutual fantasies on the nation, instigating massive investigations, the only provable conclusion of which is that Joe Wilson is a nut and a 79

liar.

"CIA man" Wilson's diplomatic career was a joke. Back when he had a job, Wilson was the guy who made sure the toilets at American embassies flushed and the commissary was stocked, in such desirable locations as Niger, Togo, South Africa, Burundi, and Iraq. His big break came when Saddam waited for the U.S. ambassador to leave Iraq on vacation before invading Kuwait—leaving only "deputy chief of the U.S.

Mission" Wilson behind. The fact that Wilson had no training in Middle East affairs and did not speak Arabic was no impediment to his post in Iraq because, as the New York Times put it at the time, "he has risen within the Foreign Service as an administrative officer, someone usually more concerned that the embassy heating and plumbing work than with what is going on in the host country."26

As President Bush (41) prepared for war, he repeatedly dissed Saddam by telling him to talk to Wilson, which, in diplomatic circles, is considered one step above "talk to the hand." Wilson's major assignment during that period was to set up a meeting between Sad-dam and an actual official from the Bush administration, James Baker. People who do that sort of thing are usually called "secretaries," not "Mr. Ambassador." One of Wilson's friends boasted of Wilson's qualifications to the Associated Press: "He's certainly capable . . . to make any message." Which is so unfair: Joe also made really good coffee.

Secretary of State James Baker sent Wilson a pro forma letter conveying Bush's message that Wilson's work was "truly inspiring" and telling him to "keep fighting the good fight." (Also: "We hope we can count on your vote in the next election!") Wilson instantly began brandishing the letter to reporters. He even shared his fantasy-obituary with reporters, saying it would read: "Joseph C. Wilson IV, who was the last American diplomat to meet with Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, died . . ." Concededly, this was better than "Joseph C. Wilson IV, mostly unemployed his entire life, briefly had a paying job unstopping toilets at American embassies in Togo and Burundi ..." A 1990 New York Times article on the message-boy left behind in Iraq quoted Wilson reminiscing about the last time he had " `faced down' his own mortality" and making dramatic pronouncements about having "signed his will and paid up his [life insurance] coverage." The article noted, Àlready framed in Mr. Wilson's office is the Nov. 28 cable sent to him by Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d ..."27

Wilson was never the ambassador to Iraq, but after he accused the Bush administration of lying in 2003, some reporters decided to give him a promotion. Thus, Publishers Weekly reporter John F. Baker referred to Wilson as "the former U.S.

ambassador to Iraq."28 (Of course, John F. Baker refers to himself as "the Queen of Sheba.") Wilson's lucky break of happening to be the guy left behind when Sad-dam invaded Kuwait was called "a career-maker" by his colleagues. Wilson apparently thought so too, telling reporters his "dream assignment would be France." Alas, Wilson's next posting was to

Gabon, which even by my estimate is a country more worthless than France. Then, at age forty-eight, he was—to put it diplomatically—let go, having made only the first of four grades in the foreign service.29

So one can well imagine that after reading Wilson's delusional op-ed, top officials at the White House and CIA were scratching their heads wondering who this imbecile was.

The answer is: He's nobody. Bush was certainly not relying on anything Wilson said 80

when he referred to the conclusions of "British intelligence" about Saddam seeking enriched uranium from Africa.

I think that's the gist of what Karl Rove was trying to convey to Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper when he told him, according to Cooper's notes, "big warning!" Don't "get too far out on Wilson." Cooper processed this information through the mainstream media filter and produced an article accusing the White House of slandering Wilson: "Has the Bush administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium?

Perhaps." As long as Wilson was calling Bush a liar, the mainstream media treated his every idiocy as if it were the word of Moses.

Wilson repeatedly denied that his wife was involved in his trip to Niger. In his humbly titled autobiography, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir, Wilson stated point-blank:

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter.... She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."30 And again, he said, "The assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it. . . . Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to [Niger]."31 (How does a publisher react to some pompous jerk who wants to call his book The Politics of Truth? Okay, seriously, what are you really going to call it?)

And then the Senate Intelligence Committee heard testimony from a CIA official who told the committee that it was Wilson's wife who had "offered up" Wilson for the Niger trip. The committee also obtained the memo from Valerie Plame recommending her husband for the assignment. In the memo, Plame notes that her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." (At the end of the memo she added, "Oh, and as long as you're going out you might as well bring back a quart of milk.") Joe Wilson's response to the production of his wife's memo was, "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me." So Wilson is a liar, an illiterate, or someone who needs new eyeglasses.

With the vast diplomatic experience Wilson had fantasized for himself, he simply could not understand why anyone would imagine he was sent to Niger on the recommendation of his wife. In a state of utter incomprehension, Wilson demanded to know, "And what really did the inclusion of my wife's name add to the story?" Well, let's see now: uh, other than being the entire story, nothing.

That explains Wilson—but what about the objective, fair-minded mainstream media?

Did they think this clown was sent to Niger be-cause of his skills and experience?

Apparently so. In September 2003, crack newsman Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, said Wilson's wife had been "unmasked" by the Bush administration "for reasons we still don't understand."32 In fairness, there seems to be a lot Doyle McManus doesn't understand.

There are two interpretations of Karl Rove's tip to the media. Either: (1) He was trying to warn reporters that Wilson was a delusional nutcase, or (2) The White House was punishing Wilson for telling the truth by exposing his wife as a "covert" agent.

Well, now the results are in. Among the reasons we know Rove wasn't exposing Valerie Plame as a covert agent is the fact that Plame wasn't a covert agent. Or rather, she 81

was the type of covert, deep-cover, top-secret spy who poses for two-page color photo spreads in Vanity Fair magazine under her real name—you know, that kind of covert.

When special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating the "leak" of Plame's name, announced his indictment of a lone assistant to Cheney for perjury, he never even mentioned the law about releasing the names of covert agents. To the contrary, Fitzgerald went out of his way to avoid calling Plame "covert," instead saying her employment status was "classified"—which would only be relevant to the 1917 Espionage Act. "Jane Bond" was, in actuality, "Jane Paper Pusher Whose Husband Is a Stay-at-Home Dad Currently, Uh, Between Jobs." The closest Plame has been to "undercover" in recent years was at last year's CIA Christmas party, when she was some-body's secret Santa. It was not a crime to reveal her name, much less tell the press that Wilson's little junket to Niger was a "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" gone bad. The country could have been spared a lot of trouble if the media had not studiously pretended not to grasp Rove's point.

Incidentally, if Wilson ever believed his own Walter Mitty fantasy about his wife being a covert spy—so secret that his entire family could be killed if her identity were revealed—maybe he should have thought twice before writing an op-ed for the New York Times calling the president a liar based on information acquired solely because his wife works at the CIA.

Wilson lied about what he "didn't find in Africa." He lied about whether his wife recommended him for the trip. And he lied about his wife being a covert agent. (Other than that, everything Wilson said was perfectly accurate.) Indeed, Wilson told so many lies, there are some everyone has forgotten. When Wilson first started accusing the Bush administration of lying, he claimed he based his conclusion that Saddam had not tried to buy uranium from Niger on "sales records" that were clearly forged. Even if we skip over the absurd logic that because documents are forged, what they purport to show has been proved false—an old spy trick—it would later turn out Wilson had never seen the forged documents.

But before Wilson wrote his "What I Didn't Find in Africa" column, he was retailing the "forged documents" story to gullible re-porters, in news stories now known to be citing Wilson.

On May 6, 2003, the New York Times's Nicholas D. Kristof wrote this in his unintentionally ironically titled column "Missing in Action: Truth": I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A.

and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

[T]he envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted—except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.33

On June 12, 2003, Walter Pincus wrote this in the Washington Post:

[T]he CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the 82

country to investigate the claims [that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger], according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.34

And on June 29, 2003, Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker reported in the Independent:

A high-ranking American official who investigated claims for the CIA that Iraq was seeking uranium to restart its nuclear programme accused Britain and the US

yesterday of deliberately ignoring his findings to make the case for war against Saddam Hussein.

The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report—drawnup by the CIA—which revealed that documents, purporting to show a deal between Iraq and the West African state of Niger, were forgeries.35

After massive investigations in this country and in Britain into the uranium claim, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2004 that Wilson had never even seen the forged sales records. The forged documents—which everyone knew were forged, by the way—did not even arrive at the CIA until eight months after Wilson's Niger trip.36

Apparently, Wilson not only traveled to Niger, but through time! As the Washington Post later admitted, "the report also said Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June" when he said his conclusions about Niger were "based on documents that had clearly been forged." In response to questions from committee staff, asking Wilson how he could have known about the forged documents when he had never seen them, Wilson said he may have "misspoken" to reporters. That's what we call "The Politics of Truth."

This is the sort of nonsense that gets spread by a press corps that will believe absolutely any accusation against a Republican administration and will treat any lunatic accusing Republicans of lying as an uncontested truth-teller. The real scandal was how liberals embraced Wilson. Àmbassador" Wilson was about one step above Bill Burkett in terms of reliable sources. Burkett, you'll recall, was CBS's source for accusing President Bush of shirking his National Guard duties based on blatantly forged documents. Burkett admitted to having nervous breakdowns and having been hospitalized for depression, and, according to USA Today, an interview with Burkett ended when he

"suffered a violent seizure and collapsed in his chair." But any stumbling drunk who attacked Bush was instantly hailed by the media as the next Joan of Arc, no matter how blinding the warning signs.

Liberals' first sign with Wilson should have been his telling the Washington Post that he and his wife were discussing "who would play [her] in the movie." Wilson also reverted to fantasizing out loud about the first line in his obituary. This time, his favorites 83

were "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration . . ." and "Joseph C. Wilson IV, the husband of the spy the White House outed ..."37

But after Wilson accused the Bush administration of lying, the New York Times nearly put him on their editorial board. He was instantly embraced by Democratic senators like Jon Corzine of New Jersey, awarded a Nation magazine "Award for Truth Telling," and given a lucrative book contract. He was fawned over by Vanity Fair magazine, where his wife wore dark glasses and a scarf as if to hide her "secret identity."

Meanwhile, the only person who was undercover in the Plame household was Joe Wilson—under cover of his wife's skirt, that is.

He may have been a liar and a fraud, but Wilson could attack the Bush administration with impunity. Liberals took the position that Wilson was free to puff up his worthless credentials by implying he had been sent to Niger on an important mission directly by the vice president and the director of the CIA. But the White House couldn't respond to his delusional accusations by saying his wife sent him.

ABOUT the time Wilson was becoming an embarrassment even by the standards of the Democrats—which is a high bar—the Democratic Party's new spokesman became Cindy Sheehan, loon. To expiate the pain of losing her firstborn son, who died bravely fighting in Iraq, Sheehan decided to cheer herself up by engaging in Stalinist agitprop outside President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch. It's the strangest method of grieving I've seen outside of Paul Wellstone's memorial. Someone needs to teach these liberals how to mourn. It must be very difficult for people to comprehend the death of a loved one based on abstract ideas like "Islamic fanaticism," "retaliation," and "freedom." Because liberalism is a primitive religion, it tells people like Cindy Sheehan that her loss was the result of some intentionally evil force, like witches, evil spirits, or George W. Bush.

Call me old-fashioned, but a grief-stricken war mother shouldn't have her own full-time PR flack. After your third profile on Entertainment Tonight, you're no longer a grieving mom; you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show. At that point you're no longer mourning, you're "branding."

Sheehan was joined in her cause by Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards sent out a public letter asking people to

"Support Cindy Sheehan's Right to Be Heard," which the media almost missed because they were all in Crawford interviewing Cindy Sheehan. Joining the school of thought that says "having a loved one killed violently makes you an expert advocate for liberal policies," Mrs. Edwards noted that she, too, had a son who died. What is this, some kind of weird club or something?

We're sorry about Ms. Sheehan's son, but the entire nation was attacked on 9/11. This isn't a "teachable moment," it's a war. The Left's campaign to turn war into a matter of individuals' personal grief cheapens what we're fighting against. America has been under relentless attack from Islamic terrorists for twenty years, culminating in a devastating attack on U.S. soil on 9/11. It's not going to stop unless we fight back, annihilate Muslim fanatics, destroy their bases, eliminate their sponsors, and end all their hope. A lot more American mothers will be grieving if our military policy is: No one gets hurt!

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By the time Sheehan joined the "Surrender Now, Great Satan" bandwagon, there had already been two free elections in Iraq. The Iraqis were busily at work on a constitution.

Iraqi women were freely protesting on the street against Sharia law, and crafty Iraqi politicians were preparing to woo the "Burka Mom vote."

Fortunately, the Constitution vests authority to make foreign policy with the president of the United States, not with this week's special guest on the Oxygen television network.

But liberals think that as long as they can produce a grieving mother, the commander in chief should step aside and let Cindy Sheehan dictate the nation's foreign policy. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said, it's "inhumane" for Bush not "to understand that the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."

I'm not sure what "moral authority" is supposed to mean in that sentence, but if it has anything to do with Cindy Sheehan dictating America's foreign policy, then no, it is not

"absolute." It's not even conditional, provisional, fleeting, theoretical, or ephemeral. The only sort of authority Cindy Sheehan has is the uncanny ability to demonstrate, by example, what body types should avoid wearing shorts in public. Dowd's "absolute"

moral authority column demonstrates, once again, what can happen when liberals start tossing around terms they don't understand, like absolute and moral. As someone once said of Norman Mailer, I do not know for a fact that Maureen Dowd was drunk when she wrote that, but for her sake I certainly hope she was. The logical shortcomings of such a statement are staggering. What if the person arguing with you is a mother who also lost a son in Iraq and she's pro-war? Do we decide the winner with a coin toss? Or do we look for a woman out there who lost two children in Iraq and see what she thinks about the war? Ladies, I know logic isn't your strong suit, but come on!

Liberals demanded that we listen to Sheehan with rapt attention—and silence—but she had nothing new to say about the war. At least nothing we hadn't heard from Michael Moore since approximately 11 A.M., September 11, 2001. It's a neocon war; we're fighting for Israel; it's a war for oil; Bush lied, kids died; there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Turn on MSNBC's Hardball and you can hear it right now. Cindy Sheehan was like a touring company of Air America Radio: same old script and it's not even the original cast. The only thing Cindy added was frequent references to her son, Casey. As she wrote in an August 31, 2005, column on her Truthout.org webpage, "So it is official, Casey had his blood shed in Iraq for OIL. He died so we could pay over 3.00/gallon for gas." It's hard to construct an argument that the war was about stealing the Iraqis' oil when gas was at $3 a gallon. I guess Bush is both evil and yet too inept to steal their oil. It's a very subtle plan for the long horizon.

In any event, back in October 2002, these same anti-war arguments didn't persuade Hillary Clinton or John Edwards to vote against the war. In fact, they didn't persuade any of the liberal senators who want to be president to vote against the war. Democrats in Congress kept voting to give President Bush carte blanche, but then would turn around and deliver angry indignant speeches opposing the war when-ever there was no congressional stenographer around to memorialize their positions.

The liberal shock troops didn't even persuade Democratic primary voters, who unceremoniously dumped anti-war candidate (and one-man RNC fundraising machine) Howard Dean in favor of John Kerry, who voted for the war before he voted against it.

They certainly didn't persuade a majority of American voters, who re-upped George Bush's tenure as the nation's commander in chief.

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But liberals demanded that we listen to the same old arguments all over again, not because Sheehan had any new insights but because she had the ability to repel dissent by citing her grief. She was the angry Left's human shield.

On the bright side, Sheehan shows us what Democrats would say if they were immunized from counterarguments. Sheehan has called President Bush "that filth-spewer and warmonger." She says Bush is "the biggest terrorist in the world"—and that was just on her Christmas card to the Bush family. She says, "America has been killing people on this continent since it was started" and "the killing has gone on unabated for over 200

years." (Is it my imagination, or is somebody angling for Ward Churchill's soon-to-be-available job at the University of Colorado?) She calls the U.S. government a "morally repugnant system" and says "this country is not worth dying for."

Evidently, however, there are some things worth killing for. Speaking at an anti-war rally held by Veterans for Peace, Sheehan said, "So anyway that filth-spewer and warmonger, George Bush, was speaking after the tragedy of the marines in Ohio, he said a couple things that outraged me.... And I know I don't look like I'm outraged, I'm always so calm and everything. That's because if I started hitting something, I wouldn't stop till it was dead. So I can't even start, 'cause I know how dangerous that would be, but George Bush was talking ..." It's a wonder Bush wouldn't meet with her.

We must listen to Sheehan, but we may not respond to her. As Joe Trippi said to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, she's "had a loss, a painful loss"—so no one is allowed to criticize her. (And believe me, if any-one knows about painful losses, it's Howard Dean's former campaign manager.) He said Sheehan is

"willing to stand up to the most powerful man in the world"—at least as long as no one is allowed to respond.

O'Reilly pointed out that, contrary to Sheehan's claim that Bush was flippant and rude to her during their meeting in June 2004, immediately after that meeting, she said, "I now know President Bush is sincere about wanting to help the Iraqis. I know he's sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he's a man of faith." Finally, some-one with the moral authority to contradict Cindy Sheehan: Cindy Sheehan!

Trippi ruled this observation out of order, informing O'Reilly that Sheehan was the

"first citizen in the country ever to be charged with flip-flopping." (She had had a

"painful loss.") As the Left's Nazi block watcher that week, Trippi informed O'Reilly that only politicians can be charged with flip-flopping. "We as citizens," he decreed, "are al-lowed to flip-flop any day we want."

When O'Reilly again raised the subject of Sheehan's about-face on her meeting with Bush, saying, "she either lied then or she's lying now," Trippi said it was talk like that that led to the "hate that's spewing around the Net." So that's the way it is with liberals.

They can call Bush a "lying bastard," a "filth-spewer and warmonger," but if anyone points out that the bastard used to be "sincere," and a "man of faith," it's "hate."

The story that was lost in the media lovefest over Cindy Sheehan was that her son was a great American. After serving one tour in Iraq, Casey Sheehan reenlisted. He was not an infantryman and consequently was not required to go into combat, but when members of his unit came under attack by Islamic savages in Sadr City, Casey insisted on joining the battle to rescue his comrades. It was during that rescue mission that Casey was killed. Despite having a screwball for a mother, Casey Sheehan was a great 86

American who fought and died nobly for his friends and for his country.

It is supremely ironic that the brave men who died for their country would almost certainly be appalled at the reaction of Moms Against Anyone Dying. Perhaps this note I received by e-mail should be clipped and posted by all brave Americans in Iraq: Know this. If I am taken captive or killed by these Arab savages, I shall never disgrace myself or my nation by groveling in the fashion of many hostages and their families. There shall be no special entreaties on my behalf. I shall condone no disgusting and disloyal attempt by weepy relatives to "distinguish" me from my nation or its brave president, as in "Actually, our whole family opposed the war." If I am taken, and the animales will not let me talk on camera, tell the world I renounced any disloyal relatives and that my last words were: "God Bless America, God Bless President Bush."

We're winning this war and we are winning it because of brave men like Casey Sheehan who do not decide to throw in the towel every time an American dies. More than a hundred Americans died at Lexington Green and Concord. Should we have quit then?

The Civil War dragged on for three long years before the Union started making serious inroads against the Confederacy. You want a quagmire? That was a quagmire.

In the Battle of Tarawa, one of the first major engagements of World War II, we lost more than 1,000 men in three days. On this small island, far away from home, our Marines faced savagery of epic proportions and took quite a licking. Iwo Jima was yet to happen (7,000 Americans killed). Okinawa was yet to happen (18,000 Americans killed).

FDR hadn't "planned" properly and the Marines were required to hastily improvise mine sweeping. Should we have walked away from that war, too? Liberals keep talking up World War II, why not this war?

Liberals simultaneously demean our current war heroes and beatify (Democratic) war veterans from wars past. While turning D-Day into a religion, similar sacrifice and bravery in the War on Terrorism appalls them. They disparage real religion as pagan worship of ancestral power, but they have turned military service (by Democrats) into a secular religion, mostly honored in the breach. At the mere mention of one of the seven or eight veterans in the entire liberal community, we are required to fall on our knees, mouths agape. Any other reaction is deemed an attack on their patriotism.

It was cruel and unfair to respond to Democratic senator Max Cleland of Georgia about anything he ever said or any votes he ever cast—because he dropped a grenade on himself in Vietnam. Cleland took full advantage of his status as another Democrat Unanswerable by viciously attacking Republicans who criticized Democrats for their repeated proposals that we surrender in the War on Terrorism.

From a stage on which another Democratic senator, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, called Bush and Cheney "chicken hawks," Cleland said, "Dick Cheney got five [draft]

deferments. John Kerry volunteered for Vietnam, as did I. President Bush spent that time guarding the shores of Texas and didn't even show up for his final physical in the Guard and got out eight months early." 38

After Tom DeLay joked to a Republican audience, "I certainly don't want to see Teddy Kennedy in a Navy flight suit," Cleland fired off a nasty letter—a letter, no less!—

to DeLay saying, "This country deserves more patriots like Senator Kennedy, not more 87

chicken hawks like you who never served."

Most Democrats shy away from citing Kennedy's "military service" with such bravado. The "military service" at issue consisted of Kennedy's spending two years in NATO's Paris office after he was expelled from Harvard for paying another student to take his Spanish exam. 39 This was during the Korean War. While Kennedy faced down nasty paper cuts in Paris, other American boys his age were freezing and being shot at by the Chicoms at the Yalu River.

Accusing anyone he disagreed with of being a "chicken hawk" be-came so natural for Cleland that he even said it about military heroes and former POWs. After six Republicans called on John Kerry to apologize for what he said about American troops in Vietnam on the thirty-third anniversary of Kerry's Senate testimony, Cleland called the Republicans "a bunch of chicken hawks who never went to war, never felt a wound, but are so quick to criticize a man who went to war and got wounded doing it." 4°

The Republicans' military service may not have been as awe-inspiring as a desk job in Paris after being thrown out of Harvard for cheating, but it was still pretty impressive.

Five of the six Republicans Cleland attacked were combat veterans, and the one who was not had spent thirty years in the Army Reserves. Among the five was Representative Sam Johnson (R-TX), who flew sixty-two combat missions in Korea and twenty-five over North Vietnam, was shot down in combat over North Vietnam, and was tortured as a POW for six and a half years. Another was Representative Randy Cunningham (R-CA), one of only two American Navy aces that the Vietnam War produced. But apparently none of these men had the dauntless courage to drop a grenade on his own foot.

In November 2005, Democratic representative John Murtha called for—as the New York Times put it—the "immediate withdrawal of American troops" in the middle of the war. At that point in the war, the U.S. military had deposed a dictator who had already used weapons of mass destruction and would have used them again. We had found evidence proving that Saddam Hussein was working with al Qaeda and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger. Saddam was on trial and his psycho-path sons were dead. The American military had captured or killed scores of foreign terrorists in Baghdad. The Iraqi people had voted in two free democratic elections already and were one month away from a third vote for a National Assembly. The long-suffering Kurds were free and no longer required 24/7 protection by U.S. fighter jets. Libya's Muammar Qaddafi had voluntarily dismantled his weapons of mass destruction, and Syria had withdrawn from Lebanon. Last but certainly not least, the Marsh Arabs' wetlands ecosystem in central Iraq that Saddam drained was being restored, so even the Democrats' war goals in Iraq were being met.

The American military had done all this with just over 2,000 deaths. These deaths are especially painful because they fall on our greatest Americans. Still, we were a lot farther along in the Iraq War than we were after the first 2,000 deaths in any other war. There were about 600,000 deaths in the Civil War, 400,000 deaths in World War II, and 60,000

deaths in Vietnam—before Walter Cronkite finally threw in the towel and declared victory for North Vietnam. No one wants to think about the deaths of Americans in any war, but that's the operative word: war. We're in a war.

John Murtha, or what is known as a "hawk" in today's Democratic Party, looked at what our military had accomplished and said, "Many say that the Army is broken." He complained, "This war is not going as advertised; this is a flawed policy wrapped in an 88

illusion." While our allegedly "broken" military was in harm's way, Murtha then demanded that we withdraw our troops, claiming Americans had turned against the war:

"The American public is way ahead of us."

Fed up with being endlessly told "the American people" had turned against the war in Iraq, Republicans asked the Democrats to show what they had in their hand. Republicans introduced a resolution that would do exactly what the Democrats claimed the "American people" were clamoring for: withdraw the troops. By a vote of 403–3, the House of Representatives wasn't willing to bet that "the American people" wanted to pull out of Iraq. (This vote also marked the first time in recent history that the Democrats did not respond to getting their butts kicked by demanding a recount.) The vote was all the more shocking because of what it said about the Democrats' motives in at-tacking the war—as well as alerting us to three members of Congress we really need to keep an eye on: Cynthia A. McKinney (D-GA), Robert Wexler (D-FL), and Jose E. Serrano (D-NY). All Democrats—go figure.

It is simply a fact that Democrats like Murtha were encouraging the Iraqi insurgents when they said the war was going badly and it was time to bring the troops home.

Whether or not there was any merit to the idea, calling for a troop withdrawal—or

"redeployment," as liberals pointlessly distinguished—would delay our victory and cost more American lives.

Democrats fondly remember the Vietnam War because their anti-war hysteria at home helped lose that war for us. Anti-war protests in America were a major source of moral support to the enemy. We know that not only from plain common sense but also from the statements of former North Vietnamese military leaders who evidently didn't get the memo telling them to lie. In an August 3, 1995, inter-view in the Wall Street Journal, Bui Tin, a former colonel in the North Vietnamese army, called the American peace movement "essential" to the North Vietnamese victory.

"Every day," he said, "our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9

A.M. to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement." And he named names:

"Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses."

What are we to make of the fact that—as we learned from the 403–3 vote—the Democrats didn't even want to withdraw troops from Iraq? By their own account, there was no merit to their demands. Before the vote, Democrats could at least defend themselves from sedition by pleading stupidity. After the vote, we knew even they didn't believe what they were saying about the war. ' (Fortunately, thanks to that vote, the Islamo-fascists knew it, too.) The Democrats enjoy giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats' behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle. They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on their own proposals to withdraw troops, they disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.

Or—as President Bush put it—Murtha is a "fine man, a good man" who served with

"honor and distinction," who "is a strong sup-porter of the United States military." Bush said he was sure Murtha's "decision to call for an immediate withdrawal of our troops . . .

was done in a careful and thoughtful way." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also 89

called Murtha "a fine man," saying, "[I]t's perfectly proper to have a debate over these things, and have a public debate." National Security Adviser Steve Hadley called in his praise of Murtha from South Korea, saying Murtha was "a veteran, a veteran Congressman and a great leader in the Congress."

The nation hadn't witnessed this much jingoistic hero worship since General Douglas MacArthur returned from Korea. Can't Republicans disagree with a Democrat veteran without praising him for six days straight? Even after Murtha had time to reflect on his insane proposal to withdraw troops in the middle of the war, his explanation was—

according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette—that "his views began to change as attacks on U.S. troops rose this year and he realized that they `had become the target.' " It took this military genius two and a half years to realize that the Islamic fascists were shooting at U.S. troops? A veritable Patton, this Murtha. In other words, Murtha would support U.S.

troops fighting a war, but only provided the enemy does not make our troops "the target."

I assume the logic of this position requires no further refutation than stating it.

It is simply axiomatic that any Democrat who ever brushed against the cloth of a military uniform is automatically a saint. How about our veterans? What about Sam Johnson, Duncan Hunter, Oliver North, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy? What about the Swift Boat Veterans? They were all brave men—braver than Kerry. Don't they deserve the same presumption of magnificence as Democrat veterans? You wouldn't know it the way Democrats are constantly carrying on about their military service, but there are a lot more Republican military veterans than there are Democrat veterans. Despite all their bluster about "chicken hawks," in the very Congress whence Murtha issued his demand to withdraw troops Republican veterans outnumbered Democrat veterans 87-62. 41

Former representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham never did something as insane as proposing that we withdraw troops in the middle of a war. But a week after Murtha was proposing unconditional surrender in Iraq, Cunningham did admit to taking bribes as a congressman. Cunningham is a Navy ace. He shot down five MiGs, three in one day, including a North Vietnamese pilot with thirteen American kills. And yet Democrats don't get sweaty whenever Cunningham's name is mentioned. Indeed, no Democrat breathed a word of Cunningham's unquestioned heroism before launching into angry denunciations of him. Representative Nancy Pelosi called Cunning-ham "the latest example of the culture of corruption." Even in his disgrace, Pelosi is not fit to polish Cunningham's boots. No liberal prefaces attacks on Colonel Oliver North with a recitation of North's magnificent service as a Marine. And unlike Murtha's, North's record is known. As long as liberals are going to be jock sniffers for war veterans, let's at least be equal about it. Why aren't Democrats obligated to praise North's war service before disputing his views?

After Murtha proposed withdrawing troops from Iraq, not one Republican attacked him personally. To the contrary, the only personal attacks leveled in response to Murtha's proposal came from John Murtha—who responded to Vice President Cheney's defense of the war by saying, "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." This must have been Murtha's way of thanking Cheney for referring to him as "my friend John Murtha" and "a good man, a Marine, a patriot."

Democrats brag endlessly about their war records and wave the flag like mad until it 90

comes time to cough up the record. When challenged repeatedly over the years by various Vietnam veterans, Murtha has refused to release medical records on file with the Department of Defense proving he was entitled to his two Purple Hearts. A fellow Democrat, decorated Vietnam veteran, and congressional colleague who ran against Murtha in a primary, Don Bailey, has said on numerous occasions that Murtha admitted to him that he didn't deserve his Purple Hearts because he wasn't injured. 42

But despite the peculiar murkiness of Murtha's war record, I will stipulate that the records he refuses to release are filled with exploits that would put Audie Murphy to shame. I am willing to impute greater courage to Murtha than exhibited outside the gates of Troy. I shall assume he fought at Valley Forge and in the Peloponnesian War.

Whatever is in those elusive DOD files, Benedict Arnold was a hell of a better fighter than John Murtha. Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British, repelled a British invasion near Lake Champlain, and most significant, led the charge at the Battle of Saratoga. Yet and still, there is one thing we can't forgive even a great military hero for. Benedict Arnold was a traitor and we revile him, his name enshrined as a synonym for treason.

Perhaps the Democrats should resuscitate George McClellan as the original anti-war combat veteran of their party. McClellan was appointed commander of the Union Army by President Abraham Lincoln. But he was constantly carping about the war—he complained it was being fought against slavery instead of against the Confederate Army.

McClellan repeatedly refused to go on the attack, saying Lincoln hadn't planned or provided the Union Army with sufficient armor. Finally, Lincoln fired McClellan in a letter that read, "My dear McClellan: If you don't want to use the Army I should like to borrow it for awhile." In 1864, McClellan ran against Lincoln as an anti-war Democrat.

Lincoln faced huge internal opposition within the Union from people who didn't care about slavery and had grown weary of the war. Should people have backed McClellan over Lincoln because of McClellan's demonstrably superior military service? He would have allowed the dissolution of the Union and the continuation of slavery. But who could speak with greater certainty of the horrors of war than General George McClellan?

If those of us who didn't fight are wimps who don't know the real truth of war, I say, Fine. Let's allow only combat veterans and active military members to vote. Everybody else shut up—including me and the vast majority of liberals. Kerry, Kerrey, Cleland, Inouye, and Murtha—that's it; they've got five votes. Until then, I don't want to hear anything more about "chicken hawks." Let's have an end to it. The media's persistent use of the word hawk to describe Murtha was somewhat misleading. His 2005 demand that we withdraw troops in the middle of a war was not the first time Murtha failed to live up to the description. To be sure, in 1991 Murtha supported the Gulf War, as did most sentient primates to the political right of Gore Vidal. He's been dining out on that vote ever since.

In September 2002, amid loud claims that Murtha was "one of the first of President Bush's chief Democratic supporters" in the Gulf War, Murtha was described as a surprising naysayer on the Iraq War resolution. He said the president was going about it

"the wrong way." Boasting of his superior credentials in matters of war and peace because he served, Murtha said, "I have found that the guys who haven't been there are more likely to vote to go to war." 43 In the end, ex-marine John Murtha voted in favor of the war resolution so that, henceforth, each one of his repeated criticisms of the Iraq War 91

would be treated as a shocking about-face from an Iraq War supporter and provide reporters with a new excuse to retell the story of his daunt-less valor as a soldier (with precious few details).

In September 2003, Murtha complained that the administration had "severely miscalculated" the war in Iraq and noted that the "latest polls show that we've lost the American public." 44 On May 6, 2004, he said, there weren't enough troops "to prevail in this war." 45 In his defense, at that point there had only been one successful free democratic election in Iraq—their first in some fifty years—as opposed to the three we've got under our belts now.

In September 2004—right about the time John Kerry mysteriously took up goose hunting—an increasingly unhinged Kerry began claiming Bush had a secret plan to reinstitute the draft as soon as the election was over. We're still waiting for our draft notices, Senator. Of course, Kerry also predicted during the campaign that he would release his complete military medical records, and that hasn't happened either.

Only one member of Congress backed Kerry's claims of an impending draft: John Murtha—based on secret inside information. Murtha said "he had learned through conversations with Pentagon officials that beginning in November, `the Bush administration plans to call up large numbers of the military Guard and Reserves, to include plans that they previously had put off to call up the Individual Ready Reserve.' "46

What happened to those plans? Did no one in the media ever ask? And why were Democrats constantly excoriating Bush for not having a "plan," while simultaneously accusing him of having plans he didn't have?

But a year after complaining Bush had not deployed enough troops—and, indeed, that there were secret plans to reinstitute a draft—Murtha thought there were too many troops in Iraq. Murtha didn't like the "not enough troops" porridge, so then he tried the "too many troops" porridge, but he never found the "just enough troops" porridge.

So it wasn't that big a surprise when, in November 2005, demurely standing in front of seven American flags and a bust of John F. Kennedy, Murtha called for withdrawing all troops. But once again, the media treated Murtha's carping about the war as especially dam-aging to Bush inasmuch as it was coming from a "leading Democratic hawk on the Iraq war turned dove," as the New York Daily News put it.47 The Washington Post breathlessly reported Murtha's call to with-draw troops under the headline "An Unlikely Lonesome Dove." The article noted that Murtha's "brand of hawkishness has never been qualified by the word `chicken.' "48

How many times do we have to hear about the bolt of lightning with this guy? I did not know the road to Damascus was this long, with so many opportunities for conversion.

The Democrats and their pals in the media considered the vote in November 2005 on Murtha's proposal to withdraw troops from Iraq a Republican dirty trick. I see that my handy Democrat-to-Republican phrase book translates "dirty trick" into "up-or-down vote." Democrats think they should have a right to naysay the war effort and embolden the enemy without anyone calling them on it.

Deploying their usual fallacy of composition, liberals say that be-cause they have a constitutional right to say stupid things, the stupid things they say must have merit. The Nazis had a constitutional right to march in Skokie, Illinois; that doesn't mean we should kill the Jews. Yes, Democrats are constitutionally entitled to be stupid. They are, after all, Democrats. But they're wrong and everyone knows it including them, apparently, by a 92

vote of 403-3. They say their "right" to carp pointlessly about Iraq is patriotic because that's what the "troops are fighting for"—implicitly admitting, I might add, that our cause in Iraq is just. Yes, and I have a right to call Democrats blowhards, moral cowards, and traitors. (But in the interests of brevity I'll spare you the twenty minutes of praising them first.)

No one is disputing whether anyone has a right to say anything. What we're saying is—as indicated above—they are liars, cowards, and traitors. If the same person who told President Bush to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were advising him on foreign policy and we invaded the Cayman Islands instead of Iraq, I, too, would be criticizing the war. But I wouldn't pretend that by calling for an immediate troop withdrawal, I wasn't encouraging the Cayman resistance force to hold on and fight harder. Clearly I'd be offering aid and comfort to the poolside waitresses, cabana boys, and scuba instructors we were fighting. But if there were a vote to withdraw troops from the Cayman Islands, I wouldn't pout and say that's not fair and then vote against it. It is simply a fact that naysaying the war and claiming that things are going so badly that troops must be with-drawn will encourage the enemy and demoralize our troops. Why can't the Democrats just admit that?

When our troops came under a bloody attack in Somalia in 1993, President Clinton ordered a humiliating retreat—on the advice of John Murtha. Calling on Clinton to pull the troops out, Murtha said, "Our welcome has been worn out"—which I think is the essence of battlefield valor: the ability to know when staying another minute would just be tacky. And sure enough, perhaps out of force of habit, Clinton pulled out before finishing. Our troops emerged from a typically incompetent Clintonian mission with unvarnished heroism. They didn't run, Clinton ordered their retreat—a retreat that was later specifically cited by Osama bin Laden as proving to al Qaeda fighters that America was a "paper tiger." After a few blows, bin Laden said, America would run in defeat,

"dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat."

In the current war, Democrats make the same proposal over and over again and then attack disagreement by portraying it as an attack on their "patriotism"—and it is a violation of law to question a liberal's patriotism.

Democrats screamed like stuck pigs when White House press secretary Scott McClellan meekly remarked that by proposing to with-draw troops in the middle of a war Murtha had adopted "the policy positions of Michael Moore." The Chicago Tribune said the "debate got ugly" when McClellan "lumped Murtha with filmmaker Michael Moore."49 A Boston Globe columnist said the White House was "impugning the reputations and patriotism" of opponents by comparing them to Moore.50 The New York Times called the comparison to Moore a "blistering statement"51 and "an unusually critical statement."52 Liberals could conceive of no greater calumny than associating a Democrat with Michael Moore.

To be sure, Moore's propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11 was pretty seditious. Moore compared the terrorists in Iraq killing American troops to the Minutemen of the American Revolution saying, "They are not the enemy" and "their numbers will grow—

and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?"

But since when was Michael Moore persona non grata with liberals? A year earlier, Times columnist Paul Krugman had hailed Fahrenheit 9/11 for telling "essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain." The only time 93

Democrats tried to dissociate themselves from Moore—other than when they found themselves positioned between him and a buffet table—was when McClellan compared him to John Murtha. Until that moment, virtually every prominent Democrat was rushing to associate himself more closely with Moore.

The Democrats' most beloved president ever, Bill Clinton, gave Fahrenheit 9/11 a ringing endorsement in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, saying, "I think every American ought to see it.... As far as I know, there are no factual errors in it" (and to be fair, it was more factual than Clinton's 1997 grand jury testimony) "but it may connect the dots a little too close—about the Saudis and the Bushes, and the terror and all. I'd like to see it again before making a judgment about whether I think it's totally fair."53 Clinton might have been a little touchy on the subject of the Saudis, having accepted millions of dollars in donations from the Saudi royal family and Saudi business-men for his presidential library,54 to say nothing of their shared view-points on the status of women.

When Moore endorsed Democrat Wesley Clark for president, Clark proudly posted the endorsement on his website55 and invited Moore to speak at his fundraisers. And, of course, Moore sat with Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention, which drew more than a few stares, mostly from people wondering when the luxury box would collapse.

Tom Daschle and Terry McAuliffe attended the Washington, D.C., premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, when Daschle was still Senate minority leader and McAuliffe was chairman of the DNC. David Boies, former election-stealing lawyer for sore loser Al Gore, was cohost of the event.

Moore's movie was being promoted by a veritable Who's Who of Democrat flacks, including Howard Wolfson, Hillary's former press secretary; Michael Feldman, former adviser to Al Gore's 2000 presidential race; and Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane, former spokesmen for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Attending the advance screening of the movie in Manhattan were former UN ambassador and Democrat Richard Holbrooke; former Clinton adviser, Democrat Vernon Jordan; former Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton; Democrat Al Franken; and devoted Clinton supporter, Democrat Martha Stewart—representing convicted felons, a key segment of the Democratic vote. It was like a Diddy birthday party in the Hamptons, but with less gun-play.

If the Democrats don't want Republicans associating their good names with Michael Moore, perhaps they should stop associating with Michael Moore.

Or does revealing the Democrats' association with Michael Moore violate some criminal law I'm unaware of? Perhaps liberals will claim Moore is a "covert" agent with the CIA—assuming a big, sweaty behemoth like Michael Moore could actually be concealed—and McClellan has outed him. Or does the fact that Murtha fought in Vietnam prohibit comment on anything he says? Does he have "absolute moral authority,"

too?

How about simply repeating what Democrats say? Can we do that? At the end of 2005, the Republican National Committee ran a Web ad showing various Democrats sharing their insights about the war in Iraq, with a white flag waving between each video clip:

HOWARD DEAN, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: The idea that we're going to win the war is an idea that, unfortunately, is just plain 94

wrong.

[white flag waving]

SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CA): There's no specific time frame, but I would say the withdrawal has to start now, right after the elections, December 15th.

[white flag waving]

SEN. JOHN KERRY (D-MA): There is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women ...

At the end of the commercial, the camera panned back to show a soldier watching the clips and ends with the message "Our soldiers are watching and our enemies are too."

What are they going to accuse us of now: taking their comments in context?

Guess who the Democrats sent out to attack the RNC ad? We're almost at the end of the chapter, so you shouldn't have to read ahead. Was it "NATO Paris office" Kennedy?

Was it "Bad Back" Dean? (Dean avoided Vietnam by producing a note from his doctor and a fake limp at the army recruiting office—before repairing to Aspen for months of skiing.) No! None of these. It was one of the Democrats' surprise military war heroes.

Having already used up the war service of Cleland, Kerry, and Murtha, this time it was . .

. Senator Daniel Inouye, World War II Medal of Honor winner!

Inouye denounced the RNC ad, saying, "As a veteran of World War II, I know what it's like to fight a war and put your life on the line every day. I also know what it takes to win a war, and I know that politics and an attack machine like the president's plays no part in it." Remember: The alleged "attack machine" did nothing but show clips of Democrats talking about the war—and two of the Democrats weren't veterans or widows, so even under the "Cleland rule" we're allowed to criticize them!

The machismo of liberals about "real war" reached hysterical pro-portions in a Nicholas Kristof New York Times column decrying Bill O'Reilly's Fox News stories about liberals' war on Christmas by lecturing O'Reilly on "real war":

"Look, I put up àChristmas tree,' rather than àholiday tree,' and I'm sure Mr.

O'Reilly is right that political correctness leads to absurd contortions this time of year.

But when you've seen what real war does, you don't lightly use the word to describe disagreements about Christmas greetings. And does it really make sense to offer 58 seg-ments on political correctness and zero on genocide?"56 Kristof knows "real war" not because he's fought, mind you, but because he's covered wars as a scribbler. So no more chatter about liberals' war on Christmas, Fox News! Perhaps Kristof should raise the importance of "real war" with his colleague Frank Rich, who had a column on the gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain, just above Kristof's column that day. Is "real war"

more important than a review of a movie about gay cowboys? Rich's column was one of four articles in the Times that day on Brokeback Mountain,57 the tenth in the Times that week, and Rich's tenth gay-themed column for the year—out of forty-seven columns in all.

Liberals shape the debate with loud chanting, monopolize your brain through the TV, and then pull cheap parlor tricks to prevent any opposing arguments from being heard.

Her husband died! Her son died! His kid almost died, partly as a result of candidate Al's own negligence! His wife works at the CIA! He's a war hero! He covered a war in Darfur for the New York Times! Stop the hate! They yell in unison, frightening people with their 95

ferocity, and then announce that disagreement will not be permitted.

What crackpot argument can't be immunized by the Left's invocation of infallibility based on personal experience? Today, a Democrat called for the institution of Communism in America, confiscation of all private property, forcible agricultural collectivization, imprisonment of intellectuals, and seizure of all handguns—moments before her entire family was wiped out in a tornado. Responses? Perhaps the Democrats could find an orphaned child whose parents were brutally hacksawed to death to put forth their tax plan. If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we're allowed to respond to?

96

6 THE LIBERAL PRIESTHOOD:

SPARE THE ROD,