Sunday, February 13, 2005
Never Having to Say You're Sorry
Don't look now but Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is accusing the Bush administration of recklessly drawing down our military strength - which is having the effect of emboldening the otherwise peace-loving Kim Jong Il to threaten his east Asian neighbors with his fresh nukes.
The selective amnesia of the left wing of the Democratic Party, as exemplified by Pelosi, is breathtaking. She has of course forgotten that she and her ideological brethren spent the decade of the nineties gutting our military capability. Perhaps more egregious is her obliviousness to the fact that it was Messrs. Carter and Clinton who negotiated the fabled Framework Agreement, a much celebrated triumph of diplomacy that did little more than give the North Korean dictator the wiggle room he needed to advance his nuclear designs.
But the days when such gratuitous and destructive criticisms can be leveled, without political repurcussion, may rapidly be drawing to a close. The internet and the bloggers are fulfilling a vital function, which may yet save us from ourselves.
Wretchard of The Belmont Club sums it up:
The selective amnesia of the left wing of the Democratic Party, as exemplified by Pelosi, is breathtaking. She has of course forgotten that she and her ideological brethren spent the decade of the nineties gutting our military capability. Perhaps more egregious is her obliviousness to the fact that it was Messrs. Carter and Clinton who negotiated the fabled Framework Agreement, a much celebrated triumph of diplomacy that did little more than give the North Korean dictator the wiggle room he needed to advance his nuclear designs.
But the days when such gratuitous and destructive criticisms can be leveled, without political repurcussion, may rapidly be drawing to a close. The internet and the bloggers are fulfilling a vital function, which may yet save us from ourselves.
Wretchard of The Belmont Club sums it up:
Once upon a time the simultaneous accusations of too much preparation and too little; not enough bribery and too much; a surfeit of strength and a want of it could be made without much trouble. If being on the Left meant never having to say you're sorry; not being on the Left meant being guilty without effort. You could be a Filipino cook jumping from a 110 storey building and still be a "Little Eichmann". The miracles of the saints were as nothing to the transubstantiations of the Left. But the trouble came with memory. The Internet. And with remembrance the dim recollection of betrayal.
# posted by mds : 3:30 PM
