California Conservative

President Bush used an appearance at a Grand Rapids school to make the case that the surge troops are making a difference in Baghdad and Ramadi:

“The direction of the fight is beginning to shift,” Mr. Bush said in a speech at East Grand Rapids High School in Michigan. “Day by day, block by block, Iraqi and American forces are making incremental gains in Baghdad.”
—————
To show the reduction of al Qaeda in the city of Ramadi, he showed before and after slides, claiming that cooperation from local sheiks has allowed the United States to almost completely eliminate terrorists and insurgents there over the last two months.

As I said here, don’t expect the Democrats to acknowledge the Ramadi developments. They won’t acknowledge the truth if it’s positive news because they have too much invested on repeatedly declaring Iraq a defeat. This news will get the same treatment.

I like the idea that President Bush is using before and after pictures to show progress. Democrats can and do question President Bush’s statements with a fair amount of success. It’s impossible to refute pictoral evidence that things have changed. This pictoral evidence is a prime candidate for being ignored in the Agenda Media.

Sen. Lindsey Graham took Sen. Reid to task for his defeatist statement:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), called the comment “a mistake for the ages.”

In an attempt to defend his leader, Carl Levin’s statement just made things worse:

But Sen. Carl Levin, (D-MI), said Mr. Reid’s words needed to be examined in a broader context. “I think his larger point is that there’s no military solution here; there’s only a political solution, and there doesn’t appear to be any movement in that direction,” Mr. Levin said.

It’s true that things aren’t progressing politically as we’d hoped, with the oil revenue sharing stalled right now. That said, only an idiot would believe that the only way to defeat Iranian-funded militias is with politics. Only a pacifist fool would think that that’s the road to peace.

Furthermore, anyone who watched the video of Reid’s statement knows that it wasn’t meant in the context that Sen. Levin suggests. Sen. Reid was speaking with the voice of the Insane Left when he initially made that statement to the President and when he repeated it at a news conference. The tone clearly indicated that Reid was saying that the war was lost and it’s time to pull the troops before more troops died.

For over a year, I’ve said that Democrats have chosen not to talk about victory. Instead, they’ve talked about how they don’t agree with Jack Murtha’s immediate redeployment initiative. Candidate Amy Klobuchar talked about a realistic time-frame for troop withdrawal:

Since April, I have been asking the President to give the nation a clear plan to bring our troops home safely. As with any effective plan, there should be a realistic time-frame based on specific milestones and benchmarks, with honest and current information from the administration about the status of our efforts, the training of the Iraqi forces, and the restoration of basic services to Iraq.

Barack Obama followed the same path:

One year after his bland and idea-less speech on Iraq to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (see “Obama Mouths Mush on War,” December 1, 2005), Obama returned to mush more of the same to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The U.S. should “begin to move towards a phased redeployment of American troops from Iraqi soil,” he told the business-oriented crowd.

Republicans criticized Murtha’s plan as cut and run. Similarly, they characterized Obama’s plan as cut and walk. It doesn’t take much skill to find thousands of quotes from Ms. Pelosi, Sen. Reid and their minions talking about the “safe return of our troops” to American soil.

It’s against that backdrop that Sen. Levin wants us to believe that the Democrats care about winning in Iraq. The only honest reaction I can have about Sen. Levin is to tell him that I’m not buying what he’s peddling.

Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Carl Levin, Barack Obama, Amy Klobuchar, John Murtha, Cut And Run, Defeatocrats, President Bush, David Petraeus, Lindsey Graham

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 9:26 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Iraq, Liberals, Middle East, Military, Pelosi, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.