David Warren: Slow bleed

davidwarrenonline.com ^ | February 18, 2007 | David Warren

[Tolik]

This column will not be about Iraq, directly. I think it is about something more fundamental. You know me: I’m a fundamentalist. My attempts to make sense of the world around me, in which I invite my reader to share, do not restrict themselves to the news as conventionally reported, especially on Sundays. But then, they usually start from there. Consider the following news report:

“Congressional Democrats will work with anti-war groups to pursue a ‘slow-bleed’ strategy on Iraq. Instead of voting to abandon Iraq, directly, they'll use their control over budgetary processes to gradually choke off U.S. military resources, leaving the remaining troops stranded, and blaming President Bush for their fate. This will be combined with a vast TV advertising campaign, to target the seats of vulnerable Republican incumbents.”

Now, that was a paraphrase. I have taken several wire service reports and boiled them down to these salient points. The reports themselves gave a much different flavour, superficially, because they were filled with suggestive language of exactly the kind that would be supplied by persons who, almost certainly, vote Democrat. The anti-war position is presented as a moral one, against a pro-war position that is not presented, but assumed to be animated by the worst imaginable human motives.

My reader may know that I support the fairly aggressive prosecution of American (and by extension, Western) interests in Iraq and elsewhere in the region. On the other hand, the argument for getting right out of Iraq and leaving its inhabitants to butcher one another, can be presented plausibly from a Western point of view. I could present it myself, fairly articulately, were I a sophist. But I’m not, and I can see what the other consequences would be of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq, around the Middle East and around the world. Therefore I’m against it.

Still, I can understand why reasonably well-intentioned people could argue for the “cut and run” strategy. I have intelligent friends, by no means anti-American or even viscerally anti-Bush, who hold that view.

But I cannot begin to understand the position I paraphrased, above.

Let me be clearer. I do understand how it might be adopted, cynically and irresponsibly, to advance the Democratic party in American domestic politics, at the expense of every conceivable American national interest. But I can’t understand how the people who adopted it could claim to be morally superior to the people they are opposing.

I can’t even understand why they advance their strategy so openly. For while their own description of what they are doing resembles the roseate account in the wire reports, no intelligent person, with rudimental powers of reasoning, will fail to grasp the sense conveyed in my paraphrase.

I present this as pure mystery. I cannot explain it. I look at the face of such as Rep. John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, and chairman of the House appropriations defence subcommittee. He is a man who makes much of his former service as an officer in the U.S. Marines; who has a bronze star from Vietnam. A man old enough to know how the world works, and with his hands on an important lever of power: for he can actually do things through that subcommittee to leave U.S. Marines in Iraq up the creek. And my question for him is, “How can you even consider it?”

More generally, since Mr Murtha is hardly alone in advancing this strategy of “slow bleed” (a term even its supporters have employed), how can adult men and women act so indifferently to the consequences of their actions?

It is the same point I have made in many other connexions. For instance, in Canada, I have written about radically innovative court decisions made by judges who, in their reasonings, refuse even to consider the breaches they are making in the fabric of received law, or the extraordinary fallout from the implications of their decisions. As Ted Byfield has written, one might guess they were children who did not understand the consequences of their acts, or that they were revolutionary saboteurs who did not care. But there is no third possibility.

Here is the hole in so much political argument today. It depreciates what was called “prudence” -- the “mould and mother of all virtues” in the antiquated, but still correct, view of the greatest philosophers of the past. And when that is lost, everything is lost.

Prudence requires that we acknowledge the likely consequences of our acts, at least to ourselves.

[Tolik]

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

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[Tolik]

You joined the ping list after this was posted. Take a look.

[Falcon4.0]

Maybe we forgot send enough body armor when we sent them. But now Murtha wants to deliberately take it away.

[USMCWife6869]

A man old enough to know how the world works, and with his hands on an important lever of power: for he can actually do things through that subcommittee to leave U.S. Marines in Iraq up the creek. And my question for him is, “How can you even consider it?”

I wish that I could lock him a room with me until he answers just that one question. That is all I want from Murtha at this point is a straightforward answer as to how he can even consider what he wants to do to our men and women over there.

[cinives]

ne might guess they were children who did not understand the consequences of their acts, or that they were revolutionary saboteurs who did not care. But there is no third possibility.

This is the description of liberals everywhere. Our educational system is set up to create lifelong children, and the more intelligent liberals advance the agenda knowing full well the consequences and knowing they will be able to blame it on Conservatives with the help of their accomplices in the media.

[Tolik]

Yes. You forgot to send lunch with your son on his first day of school. Yes you were wrong. So the solution now is to prohibit you from sending the lunch every day. ?!?!

I share David Warren's and others amazement how can they do it with the straight face and a huge part of population is actually buying it. I don't like much Michael Savage, but he is right on 100% saying that liberalism is a mental disorder.

[GitmoSailor]

Murtha has lost it "big time".!!!!!!

[snowrip]

Liberalism, at it's psychological essence, is not any set of coherent political beliefs, or even a philosophical foundation; rather, it is a basic inability to accept responsibility. Liberals attempt to escape responsibility from their words, their actions, their history... even from their beliefs.

Knowlege itself requires responsibiity. The left cannot even acknowledge that their actions are lunacy by any measure... Why should any thinking person expect that, given the behavior of the democrat party as of late, liberals should be treated as anything other than children?

Even children deserve at least a little wiggle room; they are, after all, children, with undevoloped faculties for higher reasoning and the attendant innocence that comes from the state of being a child. The malignancy of liberalism, however, comes from adults, who are unable or unwilling to interact with rational thought or even reality itself.

[snowrip]

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.

An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known, and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very hall of government itself.

For the traitor appears no traitor.

He speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in hearts of men.He rots the soul of a nation.

He works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city. He infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.

Cicero

[neverdem]

"Once a Marine, Always a Marine."

Jarheads must be ready to pop an aneurysm hearing Murtha these days.

[happygrl]

Here is the hole in so much political argument today. It depreciates what was called “prudence” -- the “mould and mother of all virtues” in the antiquated, but still correct, view of the greatest philosophers of the past. And when that is lost, everything is lost.

Wouldn't be prudent...sound familiar ?

[mtntop3]

The essence of the Democrats' actions, i. e., Murtha's, are intrinsically counter to the DNA in every one of us that has enabled our ancestors to survive.

Those of us not intent on a death-wish, sense this intuitively.

[ThePythonicCow]

That is all I want from Murtha at this point is a straightforward answer

He is as utterly incapable of knowingly providing a straightforward answer as a mouse is of turning three times to the right, twice to the left, and then once to the right again, by counting down from three to one.

If you lock a mouse in a cage and torture (er eh ... condition, in the Skinner sense) the poor beast long enough, he will turn thusly for you. But he will no conceptual idea what the pattern was that finally led to his being allowed to eat again.

Similarly for Murtha. You will eventually get him to say something that you accept as a straightforward answer; but he will have no clue what you were looking for.