The Democrat Insurgency
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
February 26, 2006
I would assert that the domestic conflict the current
Bush Administration along with a majority of the American people,
who cherish democracy and liberty and who deplore terrorism and dictatorial
governance in any of their manifestations is engaged against is
nothing less than the western equivalent of a terrorist insurgency. In
other words, Democrats' response to being muscled from power by legitimate
political and electoral means has been remarkably similar to the response
of the Islamists who were unseated by the American invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Each has mounted and sustained an insurgency aimed at reinstating
administrations that stood for, at the very least, overwhelming centralized
governmental control over the lives of their citizens.
In light of a paradigm shift such
as I've described, just imagine how you'd feel if your political party,
which had stood for a powerful central government that would exercise
control over virtually every aspect of its citizens' lives, had been driven
from power. Imagine that your political juggernaut which was characterized
not only by its virtually absolute legislative and judicial control but
also its control over the communications media that determined what your
country's citizens could hear and see was in danger of becoming
irrelevant, if not extinct, in the wake of the aforementioned sea-change.
And then imagine that in place of
your broadly-powerful regime there emerged an administration which championed
individual rights, an administration that stood for decentralization of
power, for transferring political control over its citizens' lives to
the citizens themselves, an administration that was supported by and gained
strength from the fact that communications media were evolving to the
point where a broad variety of viewpoints was represented, where the marketplace
of ideas and not simply political expediency determined
what news and what political viewpoints were available to its citizens.
The response of the deposed Baathist
Party in Iraq to just such an outcome has taken the form of a terrorist
insurgency whose only tactic has been to destroy, by any means possible,
every target sympathetic to the impulse toward giving a say in their lives
to Iraqi citizens. The response of the Democrat Party in America to their
recent equally crushing loss of power and influence has been, absent IEDs,
RPGs, and homicide bombers, categorically similar to that of the Iraqi
"insurgents."
The mainstream left-liberal American
and international media the same people who are more and more having
to defer to the increasingly democratized communications milieu comprised
of the internet, talk radio, and at least one cable news network
have continued to flaunt the term "insurgency," arguably in
order to downplay the unacceptability of tactics used by Islamists against
the United States and Iraqi forces deployed to provide security and to
insure that a government of the people is installed in Iraq.
Indeed, there has emerged among many
American print and electronic "journalists" a palpable sense,
almost, of "glee," that their own country was encountering difficulties
in exporting democracy to the Middle East through its incursion into Iraq.
(That the term "insurgents" has not to this point been applied
by mainstream media to Democrats only reinforces my thesis in this piece.)
The term "insurgency" seems to have come to stand for, at least
among left-leaning American journalists, a "legitimate" force
opposing what they (the aforementioned journalists) have been all too
willing to mis-characterize as a contemporary iteration of American Imperialism.
In other words, if it can be construed as working against American interests,
then it can be marshalled as yet one more journalistic weapon in the arsenal
against perceived American militarism and in support of the Islamist "insurgency."
Indeed, among those on the left,
the word "insurgency" has acquired a kind of clandestine, nod-and-a-wink
legitimacy, as Wolf Blitzer and others of his leftist-biased ilk have
used it to describe the opposition in Iraq to a democracy that might ultimately
result in a positive outcome, not only for our President's foreign policy,
but in the ultimate democratization of Iraq's citizens, not to mention
the other citizens of our planet.
Never mind that in the past year
alone millions of Iraqis chose to vote in national elections, thus expressly
and at enormous personal risk demonstrating their support for the installation
of a democratic government in their country. And never mind that these
same Iraqi citizens daily face hardships, including the prospect of random
death at the hands of Islamist terrorists who wantonly and willfully murder
their own fellow ethnic and religious brethren in the name of some finally
insupportable Islamist religious precept that most Americans, not to mention
most Muslims, simply cannot even entertain.
And never mind that the even deeper
principle at stake amounts to nothing less than a positively humanistic
resolution of western democracies' war against a global terrorist enemy
that would reduce all the citizens of our planet to the level of subjects
of an Islamist master more brutal by orders of magnitude than, for instance,
any English medieval lord to cite but one of many instances that
might be offered in opposition to this notion could have thought
of being.
The front page of the Wall Street
Journal Weekend Edition recently featured what I would characterize as
a grim, albeit ingenuous, characterization by one of that paper's Iraq
correspondents of the growing difficulties of maintaining security in
Iraq ("Under the Gun," by Farnaz Fassihi, February 18, 2005).
Nor do the more recent outbreaks of sectarian violence argue that the
situation in Iraq is improving. The message is clear: It will take nothing
less than an all-out effort by American interests to keep the Islamist
forces of chaos and nihilism from undermining the impulse for decency
and positive democratic change in that country.
The same can be said of what will
be required to repulse the Democrat insurgency currently under way within
our own borders. While I won't pretend that the threats posed by Dem insurgents
such as Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are quite as murderously
immediate as those posed by Islamist terrorists operating in Iraq, I will
nonetheless assert that the long-term effects of U.S. Democrats' destructive
criticism, of their intransigence and implicit lack of commitment to the
positive values on which our nation has been founded, and based on which
we pursue our current military policy in Iraq, are no less deleterious
with regard to democracy and the rule of law in the United States than
are those of Islamist terrorists to the goal of implementing a democratic
government in Iraq.
Since American Democrat-left-liberals
are no longer able to implement from a position of political power their
blatantly Marxist-socialist-totalitarian agenda, they have been relegated
to attacking in any way they can the forces and institutions that represent
for most Americans and for many people around the world the chance to
have a legitimate voice in their own affairs, the opportunity to worship
freely no matter what religion they espouse, and the hope that their culture
will not be subsumed by some sort of illegitimate collectivist vision
of how things "ought to be."
Because that is precisely what the
current Democrat insurgency (taking its lead, it would seem, from its
insurgent counterpart in Iraq) is proposing, albeit by default, by failing
to offer any positive proposals in support of its agenda. Translation:
Democrats, in the absence of any demonstrable positive solutions for the
problems including dramatically revising funding for Social Security
and revamping Medicare, among many others seem to have resorted
to a "take no prisoners" strategy.
Like the Marxists of the Frankfurt
School in the 1920s, whose "Critical Theory of Society" advocated
that leftists only criticize and denigrate the positions and proposals
of their adversaries while offering no constructive alternatives in the
debate on social and political issues, today's Democrats, like their communist
antecedents, seem to be incapable of offering even so much as the most
rudimentary positive alternatives to the Republican positions and programs
they purport to oppose.
Democrats have thus far demonstrated
nothing beyond the fact of their faith in the principle that if you attack
indiscriminately anything and everything that is positive in your opponents'
agenda, you will likely manage to position yourself as the voice of a
constituency estranged from precisely the political and moral and spiritual
values that western democracy stands for. To my ear, this sounds uncomfortably
like what the terrorists in Iraq are trying to effect.
All I can say is "Good luck"
to any political figure or party that determines it's in his, her, or
their best interests to buck the expressed will of the American people.
I'm talking about the will of the people to elect regional and national
representatives who share with their constituencies an overwhelming commitment
and adherence to the values that a significant majority of Americans hold.
A majority of Americans already intuitively
understands the similarities between the goals of the insurgency in Iraq
and those of the Democrat insurgents in our country. The result in both
countries will ultimately be although not without a profound and
perhaps prolonged struggle victory for the positive values on which
our own country has thrived and on which incipient middle eastern democracies
will come to build new outposts of personal and national freedom.
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