What the Democrats Aren't
Talking About
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
January 21, 2008
A character named Harry Jones in
Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep explains it this way when talking
about the disappearance of another character, Rusty Regan: "Well,
about the middle of September I don't see Regan any more. I don't notice
it right away. You know how it is. A guy's there and you see him and then
he ain't there and you don't not see him until something makes you think
of it."
That's kind of how it is with the Democrats: "They're talking about
something and then they ain't talking about it and you don't not hear
them until something makes you think of it."
Indeed, one of the keys to discovering
where successes are being achieved that are favorable to the interests
of the United States and its citizens is to take a look at what Democrats
are not talking about. These days that means, among other things, the
War In Iraq and stem cell research.
That something that you don't hear
them talking about these days is bad news, and the silence that you don't
not hear for a while until something makes you think of it occurs when
bad news is supplanted by good news. That's because the only things that
Dems want to talk about involve bad news for our country and its citizens.
The bad news that the Democrats wanted
to talk about until recently was the fact that the United States appeared
to be losing the War In Iraq. We're all familiar with Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid's pronouncement that "the war in Iraq is lost."
Like reports of Mark Twain's death, Reid's assessment was "premature."
The problem for Dems really was that, when the Iraq War began to turn
around with the implementation of General David Petraeus's surge strategy,
they didn't have any bad news to talk about. Any success whatsoever, whether
military, economic, or scientific, leaves Democrats cold. Their only hope
for victory, even, ultimately, for their survival as a political party,
depends on U.S. failure in any or all of the aforementioned important
global arenas.
The much-discussed 24-hour news cycle,
largely a function of the emergence of cable news channels and the internet,
has spawned one unfortunate consequence: America's political memory has
been seriously truncated in certain ways. Harry Reid's insipid, not to
say stupid and arguably treasonous, comments about our having "lost"
the war in Iraq are yesterday's news, and Reid and his party might not
have to pay the piper for perpetuating this dumb-ass, indeed possibly
seditious, crap.
The good news is that we no longer
have to hear Reid's and his Congressional counterpart Nancy Pelosi's fulminations
on how badly the war effort is going. And Dems' efforts to disrupt funding
for the now-successful military campaign in the Middle East are actually
beginning to be seen for what they are: attempts to turn their misguided
political views into policy that not only withdraws important financial
support for the finest military force the world has ever known, but that
undermines a policy that, again, thanks to America's military forces and
their commanding General, has effected a grassroots turnabout at the local
level in Iraq.
This surge-inspired turnaround has
Iraqis - who have finally had it up to their eyeballs with Islamist terrorists
murdering their friends and families - cooperating with American soldiers
to identify insurgents so that they might no longer impose their brutal
and invidious will on their countrymen, their co-religionists.
This good news is not something Democrats can countenance. Like vampires
- one thinks immediately of Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula cringing and drawing
back at the display of the Christian cross - Democrats flinch from the
light shed by such good news as is now emerging from Iraq.
Nor does the Democrat retreat into
the darkness of nihilism and defeat stop with the news out of Iraq. Recent
good news on the stem-cell-research front, while certainly not as dramatic
as that associated with the War In Iraq, has also pulled the rug out from
under the Dems' insistence that the only stem cell research that mattered
with regard to finding cures for heretofore intractable diseases was to
be found in that involving the destruction of viable human embryos. President
Bush's unwillingness to countenance the destruction of human life in scientific
research was sneered at by most on the left.
During the public debate on this
topic - debate which consisted largely of the two sides' firing the TV-news
equivalents of broadsides across one another's bows - one of the things
that Democrats and their cohorts in the mainstream news media managed
to suppress by simply out-blustering their opponents was the fact that
the only successes in developing stem-cell-based cures for otherwise refractory
diseases and disease-like conditions had actually come not from embryonic
stem cells but from stem cell samples taken from adults and genetically
modified before they were transplanted back into the very adults from
whom they were originally taken.
This was not news that Democrats
wanted America to hear, hell-bent as they seemed to be on maintaining
their unwillingness to concede that the destruction of human life was
not a prerequisite for successful genetic therapy. Indeed, the political
party whose understanding of the meaning of life fails to acknowledge
that abortion involves the taking of life seems committed to extending
that notion to this: No stem-cell-research-based cures for disease can
be possible unless we destroy human embryos in the process of that research.
The bottom line is that we need to
take Harry Jones' observation to heart. In contemporary politics that
means that when Democrats stop talking about a specific issue, something
is going right for America and her citizens' interests. We're winning
the War In Iraq, and our scientists are discovering new ways to apply
the knowledge gained from genetic research so that we no longer need to
destroy viable human embryos in the process.
The further message is that, rather
than listen to what comes out of Democrats' mouths, we need to pay more
attention to what they're not talking about. That's where the real truth
of the Democrat message can be found.
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