Lunching on Pluto

In an unsigned editorial in The New York Times which does an excellent job of illustrating the nature of the bubble which the left lives in:

Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on his disastrous misadventure.

By week’s end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans’ lives.

And, ever faithful to his illusions, Mr. Bush was insisting that he was the only person who understood the true enemy.

Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy, Mr. Bush declared that Al Qaeda is “public enemy No. 1” in Iraq and that “the terrorists’ goal in Iraq is to reignite sectarian violence and break support for the war here at home.” The next day, in the Rose Garden, Mr. Bush turned on a reporter who had the temerity to ask about Mr. Bush’s declining credibility with the public, declaring that Al Qaeda is “a threat to your children” and accusing him of naïvely ignoring the danger.

It’s upsetting to think that Mr. Bush believes the raging sectarian violence in Iraq awaits reigniting, or that he does not recognize that Americans’ support for the war broke down many bloody months ago. But we have grown accustomed to this president’s disconnect from reality and his habit of tilting at straw men, like Americans who don’t care about terrorism because they question his mismanagement of the war or don’t worry about what will happen after the United States withdraws, as it inevitably must.

People who actually bother to find out what is going on in Iraq (one can not do this by reading DailyKos or Democratic Underground, or The New York Times or watching CNN) know that the violence is being caused by foreigners for the most part. They know that fanatical jihadists from other nations in the Middle East who are loyal to the Whahabbist strain of Islam championed by Osama bin Laden are supplying the manpower and agents of the Shiite Iranian government are supplying money and sophisticated explosive devices.

It is as though Mexico were sending thousands of Catholic terrorists into the US to attack Protestant targets while Canada was sending Protestant terrorists into the US to attack Catholic targets and the European media was sitting on the sidelines screaming that the US was experiencing a "civil war".

Apparently it fails to occur to the Times editorialised that if the public really was all that eager to surrender in Iraq and leave in humiliating defeat that the offices of senators and representatives would have been buried under an avalanche of letters, emails and phone calls demanding that they hold tough on the issue of timetables. That did not happen. That kind of public outpouring of concern over a piece of legislation has been reserved for opposition to the immigration reform bill.

As an aside, is it not odd that the Times demands that the president bow to the supposed "will of the people" and surrender to al Qaeda in Iraq while at the same time demanding that Congress ignore the clearly expressed "will of the people" and pass the amnesty/guest worker bill now on the table. One could at least ask for consistency from the left, but consistency implies things like settled moral convictions and a logical outlook on life. Neither of which is possessed by the left.

Finally the Times editorial writer makes the claim that those who favor cutting and running from Iraq are just as concerned about terrorism as those who wish to stay the course. But people who talk like this never bother to explain how they will induce al Qaeda, along with ever other of Americas current and potential enemies, not to take this as just another sign that America is a "paper tiger" and is ready for the final push (which will come in the form of massive numbers of terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11) to collapse like the Soviet Union.

After all it was America's cut and run from Vietnam and Somalia and our anemic response to the first World Trade Center bombing, among other things, that convinced Osama bin Laden that he could get away with 9/11.

The left can accuse the president of being delusional all they want to, but it is they who cannot see reality. To think that the US could leave Iraq in its current state without igniting the civil war which they fantasise is already going on or without bringing back terrorism to our own shores borders on the kind of disconnection from the real world that usually lands people in mental hospitals.

Bush derangement syndrome indeed.