Turning and Turning

[posted by Callimachus]

From one who turned:

[T]he Republican Party and their supporters have got to start matching their actions to their rhetoric. It is hard to take continued invocations of an "existential war" and a "war of survival" seriously in the face how both the Administration and the Republican Congress has acted over the past 3 years.

We have a President and Commander-in-Chief who allows Congress to insult our war-time allies (the United Arab Emirates) while publicly embracing those dedicated to the subversion of our nation's purpose (CAIR). We have a President, having decided on the boldest of strategies for this war, who has decided to fight it in the most timid manner possible… as if warfare can be conducted in a manner that will not offend. So we have left our enemies in the field, to fight and kill again, because George W. Bush doesn't want to use rules of engagement that might garner him criticism from some Imam in Saudi Arabia.

But most galling to me personally is the fact that the President has refused, at every turn, to trust the seriousness or the resolve of the American people. He has demonstrated, over and over again, that the last people on Earth he trusts are the American People. So rather than put forth the sort of proposals one would expect from the leader of a nation in a war of survival, we have been asked to do little more than step to the sidelines and keep our mouths shut.

Probably a quarter of the bloggers who I had on my original site's blogroll when I started it in 2003 or so -- people who were there in rough agreement with me -- now write more or less like this, if they write at all.

Another quarter write exactly like DKos or MyDD. This one, however, still is on the roll, in part because he also writes like this:

... I am far from denying that there are citizens who, for whatever reason, wish to see the United States suffer a humiliating defeat in the Iraq War. Far from it. Lots of them were in Washington D.C. this weekend. I am forever amused by the fact that when my views come into alignment with their own, some of the Left's more dimwitted denizens feel the need to hold me up as an example as a right-thinking Conservative and/or Republican … as if superficial agreement on a single issue will somehow lessen my contempt for them.