A Shrill Shill
Have a look at Eleanor Clift's latest load (emphases mine):

What Bush did at his own convention was sheer alchemy. Iraq is his greatest vulnerability; he called it a "catastrophic success." If there were problems, it was the result of the swift military victory. The administration was a victim of its own success. Who can argue with that? There's a rule in politics to hang a lantern on your problem. Bush successfully conflated the war in Iraq with the war on terror so all good patriots will suck it up and take the casualties, starting with the first casualty: truth. Absent serious arbiters in the press, who's to call him on it?

When will the anti-war Left ever come off of this stupid analysis? The President rightly saw the strategic value of confronting the Muslim world in its own geographic midst. We are there. We are fighting there for the legitimacy of democratic rule and for the sake of engaging the peoples of that region in the cause of self-interest ---economic, political, and otherwise. Does that mean we intend to make Iraq a client state and a new market? Yep. (And if you can explain why that's bad, but that helping combat the genocide in the Sudan is good because we don't have any interests there, then you're just stupid enough to be a Democrat.) But if the people of the Arab and Muslim world are engaged in an effort to join modern civilization, they will be moved from their poisonous ideologies and psychopathic death-worship. Not immediately, but in the long-term. That is what fools like Clift cannot comprehend. We are there in Iraq to burn the idiocy of violent Muslim extremism out of those people. What survives will be joined to the rest of the world; what does not must not be allowed to go farther afield.

Kerry's latest stump speech has a refrain about the $200 billion spent in Iraq and what it could buy at home. But what this election is really about is the thousand-plus dead and an administration that has the audacity to suggest a vote for the opposition helps the terrorists.

Is that what Vice President Cheney said or is that what Clift thinks he said? In any event, it is what many of us believe. There is absolutely no reason to believe that John Kerry is inclined to pursue the long-term strategic goals we have in mind for the Muslim world. He leaves everyone believing that he is committed to mere reaction instead of proaction. The Islamofascist networks know how easily moved much of Europe is towards appeasement and rapprochement ---and they certainly know that Kerry puts more stock in the approval of France and Germany than in trusting our own power and the allies we do have. How is Kerry able to persist with this lie that France is going to suddenly come and help us in Iraq? How? And why does he even think that's necessary? It is a fucking mystery that he is not called on this obvious lie more often.

Bush-haters say this election is a referendum on George W. Bush. That's fine ---because it has never been about what great things John Kerry can do to lead this country. He has never been their first choice and they deserve to be punished this November for their cynical belief (and false hope) that a "war hero" without principles was a worthy opponent to a man with moral clarity and faith in his own country's power to do good.