PS: I have heard (but only once) that the Madrid voters gave their majority to the Parti Populaire - and it was Madrilenos who were killed. Do you know anything about this?
Here are a few: --
. As for Spain-and I say this with real remorse given their suffering and national catastrophe-not since Theodosius and the late Romans paid their annual bribe money to Attila have we seen such success in bullying and terrifying a Western nation. It is right off the pages of Gibbon in his discussion of how weak, wealthy, and fearful Westerners paid Goths and Huns before Adrianople and Chalons. And this is the beginning not the end of it, as we shall soon see.
All Americans feel terrible about the Spanish mass murder, but how can we express our solidarity when the reaction is to repudiate both us and Spaniards who were allied with us? And contrast the American example: 26 days after 9-11 we were in Afghanistan attacking the Taliban and al Qaeda; the Spaniards n 48 hours were turning out to apologize. A sad day for the West.
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It may well be that the Europeans are angry with us not despite our principled help and NATO basing, but rather precisely because of it. And I don't mean our too visible presence, but rather due to deep-seeded feelings of inferiority, envy, and spite that they are weak militarily and being protected and thus vent with the antics like what we just saw from the newly-elected Spanish minister.
Perhaps a very quiet, very professional downsizing of all our troops from the Mediterranean would send a powerful message to our allies that our alliance is based on friendship and mutual sacrifice, and does not rest in perpetuity, but only as long as there is a group effort to combat a common threat. Those circumstances simply no longer exist.
Again, we really are a different people if you contrast the American and Spanish reactions to al Qaeda's unprovoked mass murder on their shores. So sad-this idea that bin Laden knows far better than we the true nature of the Spanish citizenry. Why John Kerry would wish to hint that such leaders who are angry with the United States praise him through back channels, I don't know. That may play well with his wife's foundation friends and at the Kennedy School of Government, but out here in middle America it would seem to me the kiss of death.
***I certainly hope he is correct about middle America.***
FP: Kerry’s behavior, of course, is part of a long leftist tradition of siding with our totalitarian enemies. Tell us a bit about why the Left is now so excited with siding with the bin Ladens and Husseins of this world. As always, it admires the tyrants that extinguish all supposed sacred leftist values themselves. Give us an insight into the psychology here.
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Rather they start with the premise that what America does is probably wrong, and therefore its enemies de facto can claim the moral high ground. Lately this deductive anti-Americanism is becoming laughable. Look at the rogues' gallery of our dethroned opponents--the Grenada thugs, Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam are hardly national liberationists.
While there is genuine disagreement in America over foreign policy, this shrill near-hatred of the United States government is largely a different phenomenon of a very pampered elite in the media, universities, bureaucracies, and entertainment.
Perhaps because they are divorced from the real world through their wealth, they demand instantaneously their own utopia for the rest of us 'victims'--or else. They feel guilty about their privilege, of course. but rather than moving to more pedestrian digs or teaching at a JC or sending their kids to the local public school downtown, they sign petitions and go to up-scale rallies.
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Throughout the 20th century leftist Western intellectuals worshipped Stalin, Mao and other mass killers. They went in droves to visit the communist concentration camps and they praised these societies while the killing fields were in their highest gear.
It is not just a coincidence that leftists venerate every despot that opposes the United States. The Left’s embrace of militant Islam today is just a logical continuation of Western intellectuals who travelled to Soviet Russia in the 1930s and worshipped Stalin -- and of Jane Fonda praising the North Vietnamese despots.
What I am getting at here is that there is a malicious and sinister objective within the heart of the Left. It craves totalitarianism, because totalitarianism will suffocate freedom and, ultimately, human life itself – which the Left hates the most. That every communist revolution ate its own children reveals a pernicious death wish in the heart of the Left, and I think it is very much in prominence once again in the War on Terror, in which the left is now in love with those despots who, once again, offer them the dream of extinguishing their own civil society and the freedom within it.
Hanson:
Again, while there were a few deluded who really did cut sugar cane in Cuba, [NB:reference to Robert Kennedy's children, among others] committed treason of sorts in Hanoi, and went down to idolize Daniel Ortega, most on the radical Left are really indistinguishable from most Americans in their patterns of consumption, tastes, jobs, etc.
So we are not confronted with Stalinists, hard-core Marxists, or fifth-columnists as much as those afflicted with the "Western disease"-a sort of glib self-hatred of the very society that imparts such freedom and affluence.
Of course we don't want to downplay the pernicious effects of such a malady. These fakers are serious and in fact pose our greatest challenge in the current struggle by unleashing a constant stream of negativism that encourages our enemies and weakens our resolve. The hysteria over the looting, the missing WMD, and the President's aircraft carrier landing--all that and more have clouded a stellar military victory and a largely successful effort so far to foster consensual government under impossible circumstances --something that 50 years from now we will look back on with awe.
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So I am talking about a secular religion of anti-Americanism brought on by our very success that allows such utopianism and cheap caring-and it does weaken and tire our efforts to win this war.
A final example: the President has raised domestic spending by 8% per annum, lavished funds on health care and education, offered near amnesty to illegal immigrants from Mexico, appointed a plethora of minority judges, cabinet officials, and administrators, and committed more AIDs relief funds than all prior administrations put together-and is still hated by our Left, simply because his demeanor, accent, religion, and even appearance don't validate the aristocratic Left's rhetoric about sex, class, gender, and the other. It really is a make-believe world in which a Barbra Streisand, Gore Vidal, or Arianna Huffington cheaply sound off from their estates about some purported cosmic evil fostered by poor deluded Americans hooked on K-Mart and NASCAR.