California Conservative

Noemie Emery’s article in the Weekly Standard is a written indictment against Harry Reid, John Murtha, Ted Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich and the rest of the defeatist Democrats. Here’s how she skewers them:

“Nobody I know in a rational condition believes that the United States is going to have any kind of a military victory,” Mark Shields said in August. “So the idea is going to be, ‘We were on the cusp of victory and the rug was pulled out from under us by these willy-nilly, weak-kneed, nervous Nellies back home.’ ”

The problem with this is (1) that we may really win, and have no failure to blame upon anyone, and (2) that the nervous Nellies really did try to keep us from winning, indeed fought fang and claw to derail our best efforts.

I wouldn’t call the people that Mark Shields knows as being “in a rational condition.” They’re the same bunch that were befuddled in 1972 when Nixon won in a landslide. One Manhattan liberal even said “I don’t know how we lost. Everyone I know voted for McGovern.”

Democrats bet that President Bush wouldn’t change course, which would drive his ratings into the basement. Instead, President Bush hired David Petraeus to change course in Iraq. He also had a ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting with al-Maliki in which he emphatically told Maliki that American troops would pursue terrorists and insurgent whether an Iraqi politician tried providing sanctuary or not. President Bush also changed the rules of engagement, which took the shackles off the soldiers fighting door-to-door.

Meanwhile, Democrats tried passing nonbinding resolutions against the war. House Republicans couldn’t prevent the Pelosi/Murtha steamroller but that wasn’t the case in the Senate, where Mitch McConnell ran rings around Harry Reid, defeating the defeatist resolutions through filibusters.

Meanwhile, the surge troops flowing into Iraq were having success. Undaunted, Harry Reid’s attempted to legislate defeat. His attempt failed miserably:

In the Senate, after weeks of skirmishing, Republicans easily turned back Democratic legislation requiring a troop withdrawal to begin within 120 days. The measure set no fixed deadline for completion of the redeployment, but set a goal of March 31, 2008. The vote was 50-48 against the measure, 12 short of the 60 needed for passage.

Here’s Emery’s next shot at Democrats’ powers of prediction:

When our tale opens, it is the last month of 2006, Democrats have just scored a blowout in Congress, Iraq is in shambles, and the country is calling for Bush to change course. He does. But he changes course in the other direction, radically revising his Iraq strategy, adopting aggressive new rules of engagement, and sending in 30,000 more troops. Even before the plan was announced to the public on January 10, 2007, Democrats launched their assault. Senator Christopher Dodd declared the plan useless: “A ’surge’ of American troops will do nothing.” Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrats in the new Congress, released an open letter to Bush on January 5, decrying his redoubled effort as futile: “Surging forces is a strategy that you have already tried, and that has already failed.” The surge was “a sad, ominous echo of something we’ve lived through in this country,” according to Illinois senator Richard Durbin. “I’m confident it will not work,” said John Kerry at a Senate hearing, a sentiment echoed by Barack Obama. “Verdict first, trial afterwards,” said the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, unaware of her future as a role model for America’s congressional Democrats. And then it really got strange.

Democrats thought that they could repeat their 2006 victories by telling people that things weren’t improving. That talking point is all but dead thanks to articles in the Chicago Tribune and even in the NY Times.

Despite the information, Democrats continued peddling a dismissed storyline:

Others piled on. “The surge was supposed to bring stability…It hasn’t and it won’t,” Ted Kennedy said on May 1. “The evidence is clear it is not happening and it will not happen,” Dodd said May 15 of a potential American victory. Durbin said the day after: “This Senate knows that the administration’s policy in Iraq has failed.” Senator Joseph Biden agreed. “The surge has not worked and will not work,” he said on June 1. And in a joint letter to the president on June 13, Reid and Pelosi said, “As many had foreseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results.”

At some point, voters will have to choose whether they want pessimists who refuse to consider verifiable evidence running the war effort or if they want optimists who support the current mission running it. If you’re basing your opinion on facts, the choice is clear.

Let’s not forget the NY Times op-ed that Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon wrote. That op-ed was the first hard hit that Democrats took. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t the last. In fact, the trend lately has been tow rite upbeat articles about Iraq.

The simple recount shows that President Bush’s surge succeeded and that the Democrats’ surge failed miserably. That’s become so clear that even the NY Times has to admit it. That’s proof that it’s a gray day for Democrats.

Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Dennis Kucinich, Mark Shields, Defeatocrats, Chris Dodd, Obama, Michael O’Hanlon, Kennedth Pollack, President Bush, David Petraeus, Surge

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Foreign Policy, Hillary, Iraq, Media, Military, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.