Connecting Various Dots.

Mike at Cold Fury puts together the Dem memo that proposes to use American intelligence for political ends, Steve Den Beste's observations about the patriotism of Thomas Dewey after Pearl Harbor and a comment at the Democratic Underground wishing American deaths - lots of American deaths - to undermine something that the commenter describes as the "laughable American democracy."

The Baby Boomers will have a lot to answer for when they face George Washington in the After-life. Not the least of which will be the notion that American security or the security of Americans is a means which can be sacrificed to partisan political goals. The Baby-Boomers (First Cohort, Dem division) have spent a life-time looking to recreate the rush they felt in opposing the Vietnam War - a war that Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates quite succinctly was being won by the lethality of American firepower, even under the crippling rules of engagement that the American military had to observe.

Being a Boomer(First Cohort, Dem division) means never having to say you're sorry. In Carnage and Culture at page 420, Victor Davis Hanson observes the simple, ineluctable facts of Vietnam - the South Vietnamese government did not engage in wholesale massacres on the scale of the North, during Tet, the communists had "compled a sordid record of executions and persecutions" that were ignored or forgotten by the critics of the war, nine out of ten refugees went south rather than north. But anti-war critics, like William Shawcross could whimper that they hoped for reconciliation, didn't foresee a chain of reeducation camps, and couldn't have been expected to foresee the racist purging of the ethnic Chinese.

Shawcross whines "should we have expected" these outcomes? To which Davis responds, ""Of course" - and plain to any sensible observer of either the atrocious civil rights record of the North Vietnamese in the decades before the war or the systematic slaughters in the Soviet Union and China by Communist Party bosses."

Davis further writes "Perhaps the gratest moral crime of the American disssidents was their later near unanimous silence about the Cambodian holocaust...."

The great mystery to this Boomer (Second Cohort) is the complete absence of the wisdom that comes from experiencing life. I remember the older Boomers from those days. They pioneered the attitude that Jonah Goldberg describes as "The only thing that unites young people politically, as a general rule, is that they are — by definition — at the bottom of the learning curve and, consequently, they try to power their way uphill with passion instead of wisdom." The Boomers always thought that they knew it all at eighteen or twenty and, perhaps, they simply stopped learning. Consequently, when a new problem presents itself they trot out the same answers. For them, every war is Vietnam. Every Republican president is Richard Nixon.

Somehow, in their minds, it's always 1972.

Update: I was going to end the last post with a question about why this stuff isn't objectively and subjectively treasonous. I erased it because I didn't like the "wacky hard right" sound to the question.

Well, why isn't it treasonous? If sabotaging American military efforts with the intent of seeing Americans die isn't treason what is? (Kind of the same question about the Green River Killer - if killing 48 women isn't worth the death penalty, what is?)

Further , no one mentions it, but everyone knows that every time an American star or politician speaks out against the War, the risk of American soldiers in Iraq increases. Now, that's not to say that we should stifle speech - and we clearly shouldn't given the Western tradition of auditing military performance - but why should we pretend that such speech is cost-free.

Then, fortunately, along comes Zell Miller who says the obvious:

“I have often said that the process in Washington is so politicized and polarized that it can’t even be put aside when we’re at war. Never has that been proved more true than the highly partisan and perhaps treasonous memo prepared for the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee.

“Of all the committees, this is the one single committee that should unquestionably be above partisan politics. The information it deals with should never, never be distorted, compromised or politicized in any shape, form or fashion. For it involves the lives of our soldiers and our citizens. Its actions should always be above reproach; its words never politicized.

“If what has happened here is not treason, it is its first cousin. The ones responsible - be they staff or elected or both should be dealt with quickly and severely sending a lesson to all that this kind of action will not be tolerated, ignored or excused.

“Heads should roll!”