#rsrh In which I idly kick around the antiwar movement a bit.

I am slightly disappointed in this Victor Davis Hanson entry at NRO’s Corner on the curious event of the antiwar movement in the night-time.  It almost, but not quite, goes for the jugular.  For example, here’s this passage about the direct results of this administration’s continuation of the previous administration’s GWOT policies:

The chief symptom of this embarrassment is silence. Gone are the sloppy charges of “war criminal,” the Hollywood movies, the outbursts by celebrities, the anguished op-eds. It is almost as if the 2,000-plus suspected terrorists killed by Predators put a complete stop to all the talk of Guantanamo as a gulag or the water-boarding of three known terrorists as war crimes or any of the other harangues about supposed constitution-shredding. True, for many the hypocrisy is just the stuff of politics, but for others there is a quiet anger that they have been taken for a ride. Fairly or not, it is as if an entire corpus of prior written work, public rants, and activism between 2003 and 2008 — even if sincere — has now been exposed as mere partisan politics.

Good, so far as it goes – but “as if?” “Fairly or not?”  It is eminently fair to characterize the entire body of antiwar progressive thought (pardon the oxymoron) as ‘mere partisan politics:’ certainly the antiwar movement was not shy about reducing the pro-victory movement into something that their intellectually stunted minds could understand*.

Am I cruel?  Yes.  Do I care?  Not particularly.  If the other side had somehow managed to win the debate on the war they’d be doing their level best to throw their more vocal opponents into jail, so they can endure a little sneering**.  Besides, they deserve it: the level of stupid, ignorant self-deception needed to embrace antiwar groupthink between 2001-2009 – groupthink that ignored geopolitics, regional/military/world history for the last century, elementary economics, accepted diplomatic practices, and every single letter in the phrase ‘military science’ – simply cannot be imposed from without.  To get that deep you have to willingly participate in your own brainwashing.  And the antiwar movement did.

And they lost.

The best part?  It wasn’t even really hard.  I really want to make sure that this is made clear; if somebody out there truly thinks  that I’m evil for taking the position that, gee, maybe Kurds don’t deserve to live the rest of their lives under the waiting guns of a vicious sociopath*** – well, guess what?  By your standards, evil won.  I won, they lost, and I’m having a cup of coffee right now that’s flavored with their pain.  They can sneer back, of course… but it does lose a certain something when you’re the one who spent all that money and time and effort to earn the great privilege of having your leaders betray you, doesn’t it?

Well, break’s over.  I’ve had my fun, so time for any seething antiwar progressives to get back to work to elect Democrats who will betray them before the polls even close. But before they go, they should hit the tip jar:

What?  Obama abuses them, and they give him money.  At least with me antiwar progressives know that their donations aren’t going to be spent actively (if not quite competently) opposing their policy positions…

Moe Lane

*If I had to sum it up: JEWS CHICKENHAWKS OIL HALLIBURTON JEWS BUSH OIL JEWS.  Note the lack of verbs: progressives don’t really do that entire action thing – which is why their embracing of the ‘reality based community’ sneer was so damned hysterical.

**Not that it really matters whether they can endure it or not.

***Even if the Kurds aren’t Europeans.