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I'm hoping nobody takes General Obama's weird flights of fancy seriously. They have absolutely nothing to do with any military situation whatever, of which Obama is profoundly and disgracefully ignorant. They have to do with what he has to say to triangulate himself between his past and mistaken policy with regard to Iraq for which he still hasn't acknowledged any error, and a political position now overtaken by events that declares grandly that Bush was fighting the wrong war but the Democrats will fight the right one, an action they haven't the slightest intention of following through on once in office because it would mean they would have to take responsibility for it.

It's that last point that explains everything about the timid, tentative, and thoroughly cowardly approach taken by the Democratic party toward foreign affairs - if it can't be blamed on Bush they won't do it. Eight years of a comfortable opposition have left them so entirely reflexive that a complete paralysis has set in, and the course of action recommended by their putative strategic thinkers is (1) to refuse to acknowledge the success of the surge in Iraq and simultaneously (2) to imitate it in Afghanistan because they haven't any better ideas and they know it worked even if they'll never admit it.

Afghanistan is, of course, another case, and although bombing Pakistan might be a part of a plan it's hardly likely to do anything on its own but make noise and irritate people, much like the notorious blowing up of a few empty tents by Field Marshal Clinton. Redeploy a couple of brigades from Iraq to there? That isn't a mission, it isn't a strategic aim, it isn't a plan, it's waving a magic wand at the problem and hoping it goes away.

It is along these lines that I find the complete lack of military experience between the two ostensible Democratic candidates most disturbing. It's bad enough that they don't know what they're doing, but their staff doesn't know what it's doing either, and no one around them seems smart enough to listen to somebody who does, least of all the candidates themselves.

All true. But here is where they are checkmated - they can't trash the accomplishments of our men in Iraq, without sounding like whining traitors to every American veteran. They aren't just sliming Bush anymore. Now they are sliming men the whole nation trusts with our lives, who never fail us in anything, who do more than asked of them however impossible it sounds and with nothing in the way of support or respect. And those men both vote, and have all the guns.

The left doesn't realize its pacifism makes it dead as a doornail, but it is. It bet against the wrong Marines.