Jon Carry and Democrats' Contract On America

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
November 9, 2006

Jon Carry's recent remark (in using this spelling of the Senator's name, I'm following the lead of American soldiers far more intelligent and better educated than Carry himself) that if "you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy . . . [y]ou end up getting stuck in Iraq" certainly has constituted much-needed respite for Republicans in the relentless Democrat anti-Bush onslaught that has characterized the Left's campaign strategy this fall.

But rather than focus on the fact that Carry managed to suck a whole lot of the air out of the room where Dem political campaign attacks are concerned, I think the more important issue is that Carry inadvertently and with resounding finality revealed (for about the hundredth time, if we'd really been paying attention) how he and his fellow leftists really feel about the American military.

You'll recall that in his 1971 testimony before Congress, John Kerry (at that time, he hadn't had the spelling of his name changed by U.S. soldiers mocking his comments) claimed that American soldiers had raped, maimed and murdered Vietnamese civilians, that our soldiers were, in effect, barbarians. Carry has repeated virtually the same accusations about American soldiers in Iraq within the past year.

In neither case was Carry testifying as an eyewitness to the horrors he alleged had occurred, nor have any of the acts he accused the American military of committing been found to have occurred.

What we have here, I would assert, is the testimony of a psychopath. Carry's attestations are characterized by a great deal of obvious psychological projection. What we're hearing when Carry opens his mouth is overwhelmingly a representation of what's going on in the Senator's mind (that is, a "projection") onto a group of people for whom he holds enormous resentment, not to say contempt and hatred.

Indeed, Carry manifests the contemptuous and hateful attitude of the coward for the courageous. If, as is arguably the case with Carry, you haven't got what it takes to be a hero, then you must attack heroes for all you're worth, painting them with the psychopath's brush of projection.

That is to say, Carry hates and resents the American military precisely because it represents everything he himself has failed to manifest in his life. The military represents honor and courage, the willingness to die for one's country, for the cause of democracy. Carry has come to symbolize the skulking cowardice of a man who, according to eye-witness testimony, shirked his duty in a time of war so that he might live to denigrate his fellow soldiers another day.

In order to vindicate himself and to make himself look better in the eyes of his public, Carry (beginning in the early 1970s when he was still John Kerry) has routinely presented his psychopathic projections as assertions of truth, despite the fact that no evidence has ever been brought to bear to support his allegations.
Carry has, especially recently, become the inadvertent point man in the Democrats' revelations of who they really are, in particular with regard to the critical issue of the American military.

Carry has only done what most of us have been hoping Democrats would do all along: directly reveal, through their public utterances, who they are and where they stand with regard to our military, and, by extension, our national security. Dems have been working at obliging us for quite some time since the War in Iraq — which they voted for en bloc, lest we forget — began, but it's only since the Carry gaffe that we've had conclusive proof of their inveterate anti-Americanism.

Just the other day I was radio-surfing in the car and I chanced to hear an Air Radio (or should I say "Air America Radio") announcer discussing in great detail the possible violation of an Abu Ghraib prisoner's rights by an American soldier that had occurred in the Spring of 2004.

My only thought was, "What the hell is this guy talking about? He wants to discuss the possibility that an Iraqi prisoner's 'rights' may have been violated more than two years ago, when in the meantime Iraqi terrorist insurgents have murdered thousands of their fellow countrymen in the most cowardly and dastardly ways? And furthermore, he wants to escalate an utterly minor, not to say inconsequential, incident to the level of something that invalidates (and therefore undermines the legitimacy of) what the United States is trying to accomplish in Iraq?"

The incident sheds light on what I would call the "disproportionality" of the Left's positions vis a vis the American military. Let an American military prison guard accidentally breathe on the (American-provided) Koran of a Gitmo detainee, and lefty defenders of terrorist rights across the world pounce on the incident and use it to denounce America's armed forces.

But when — as occurs pretty much daily in Carbombistan, er, I mean Iraq — an Iraqi sectarian insurgent detonates an explosive device outside a Mosque, killing 14 innocent civilians of another sect than his own, the same lefty civil rights activists are ready to blame it on the fact of America's military presence in the Middle East.

I would argue that what the Left — the Nancy Pelosi-John Murtha-Teddy Kennedy left — really believes about America's military might, its military presence in the world, is precisely what Jon Carry's comments directly state.

Murtha's ill-advised, not to say downright silly and militarily indefensible, notion that we should withdraw our troops from Iraq and station them on Iraq's borders, ready to redeploy if needed, is simply laughable, never mind that Nancy Pelosi had his back.

And Teddy ("Are there two p's in Chappaquiddick?") Kennedy's seeing in the Abu Ghraib irregularities evidence that America was committing crimes on a par with those of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in those dictators' imprisonment of political and ethnic adversaries would be stupid, if it weren't for the fact that the mainstream media picked up the story and presented it to their readers and viewers as if it were something other than risible.

It's one thing to say that, if we elect a Democratic majority in the House this fall, we're likely to face stiff resistance to passage of further legislation in support of Bush's domestic agenda, not to mention a likely roadblock to the approval of another Bush Supreme Court appointee.

But it's quite another thing to recognize that, if Dems achieve a majority in the House this Fall, we'll be faced with an anti-American, anti-US-military political agenda the likes of which hasn't been seen since the 1930s and '40s, when the American Communist Party, whose pedigree contemporary Democrats share, represented a growing anti-American voice in our politics.

For what we are witnessing is nothing less than the contemporary iteration — shaped and driven by the political issues and events of the day — of the same anti-democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-American agenda that characterized our politics more than half a century ago. It is incumbent on us to defeat this resurgence of anti-Americanism that the Democrat agenda (or lack thereof) represents in the current electoral season. Which is to say, it is incumbent on us to defeat the Democrats' "Contract On America."