For the most part, it has done this by first creating and then exploiting a hypersensitivity to casualties which are inevitably incurred in any conflict. It cultivates this hypersensitivity by personifying the casualties and their relatives. Most of us quite rightly shrink from exploiting the bloody images of those who have died or were maimed on our behalf but, ever since Lennin, the left has learned that the ends justify the means. The ends sought by the press and the whole of the left is to deprive our democracy of the power to wage war, and even realistically to threaten to wage war as an instrument of foreign policy- at least in so far as the left might not agree with that war.
The implications of this development could not be more ominous, for, if the press and Mrs. Sheehan succeed in their end run around the American Constitution, they might also succeed in indirectly causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans-or Iranians-or North Koreans.
If the left and the press succeed in their quest, then, inevitably, the United States will have no credibility if it threatens war against rogue states who would develop atomic weapons and thereafter sell them or otherwise pass them along to crazed Islamic terrorists. Tens of thousands of American lives could go forefit. Or a staunch President such as George Bush, unable to intimidate such nations because the left has undermined his credibility, must make resort to strikes heavy enough to destroy such weapons, perhaps at the cost of many Iranian or North Korean lives.
Today we are in a place where the left has succeeded in killing off the Bush doctrine. If not dead, it is at least comatose and will only be revived by another massive strike on the homeland. The blood of these dead Americans will be on the hands of Mrs. Sheehan and those bloodstained (in this case, not ink-stained) wretches of the fourth estate.
