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.