Mike's America Year in Review: June 2005

June 2005: Defeatism in Full Swing!

Mike's America for June 2005 saw the Defeat America campaign swing into high gear on two fronts. First, there was the "Iraq is a quagmire, another Vietnam" approach. They even trotted out Jane Fonda, who was most famous during the Vietnam era for the photo of her on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun targeting American flyers .

The second tack of this campaign was the assault launched in the United States Senate by Assistant MINORITY Leader Dick Durban (Defeaticrat-IL):

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings.

Never in recent memory had such a wicked and vicious calumny been made against our nation's troops on the Senate floor.

Apparently, the lamestream media was too busy trying to reveal supersecret spy programs to provide much media coverage. If the story made the papers at all, it was tucked away safe behind other more important news. Later in the month, Karl Rove said: "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers." Howls of outrage ensued, trumpeted on every front page.

Moral Relativists: Do They Know What Evil IS?

As the Gitmo fracas was beginning to break, I reposted a short essay "Left Perverts the Meaning of Evil"

It's a theme we have come back to again and again during the year. The left ignores mass graves with hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and infants in Iraq and boo hoos about a frat party in Abu Ghraib prison, or makes absurd comparisons to Nazis in their death camps. Well some of us have actually BEEN to a Nazi death camp and know the difference. Anyone who has felt the still palpable sense of evil and horror at a place like Dachau will never confuse that with what happened at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo.


The ovens of Dachau. They were not baking bread here.Mike's America photo.
"Moral Equivalency Alive and Well" was the title of a June 14 post featuring an article by Brandon Crocker in the American Spectator. It's worth repeating a shorter excerpt as the issues expressed do not seem likely to go away any time soon.

American Spectator: the American and European left propounded a belief known as "Moral Equivalence" which essentially said that America was every bit as bad as the Soviet Union. The argument ran something like: "Sure, Stalin, utilizing the powers of a totalitarian state, executed millions of his own citizens, but the United States interned Japanese-Americans during World War II; the Soviets enslaved eastern Europe, but the U.S. supported dictators like the Shah of Iran." The point was that the world was made up of two "morally equivalent" superpowers that were both doing nasty things (though somehow the Soviet's actions were more "understandable" or even "defensive") in a struggle for world domination and that America, the leader of the "so-called" Free World, had no moral standing to object to the Soviet empire.

Apparently, the doctrine of Moral Equivalence did not die along with the Soviet Union. The left has just substituted a new evil to which the United States is supposedly morally equivalent.
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This was the popular notion echoed by Ridley Scott in his film Kingdom of Heaven in which the real dangerous troublemakers in the world are the religious -- be they Christian or Muslim. Compare for instance the Christian world's reaction to Palestinian gunmen killing a caretaker and taking over the Church of the Nativity, and the Muslim world's reaction to false reports about a Koran being flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay, or the Christian reaction to writers and filmmakers who produce works critical of Christianity and the Muslim reaction to a filmmaker like Theo Van Gogh or a writer like Salman Rushdie. Pretty much the same, right?
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The comparisons made by the proponents of moral equivalence have always been transparently absurd. Yet those that give voice to these arguments think their grotesque hyperbole is justified in order to make their point -- though they are often deceptive about what, exactly, that point is. But just as during the days of the Soviet empire, today's proponents of "moral equivalence" merely demonstrate their own moral -- and intellectual -- bankruptcy.

In "The Truth Behind the Gitmo Fracas" I posted a piece by Ralph Peters in the New York Post:

Torture? Who and when? Koran abuse? I'd rather be a Koran in Gitmo than a Bible in Saudi Arabia. Illegal detentions? Suggest a better way to handle hardcore terrorists. Maltreatment? Spare me. The food the prisoners receive is better than what I had to eat in the Army.
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Oh, and thanks to the "mainstream" media for assuming that our country's always wrong.

There is a culture of torture in the world. Blessedly, America isn't part of it. When a few of our troops make mistakes, they're punished. Given the magnitude of our task and the unprecedented conditions we face, it's remarkable our errors have been so few.

What should enrage every decent citizen is that the real torturers "from Zimbabwe to China, from Syria to North Korea" get a pass from the political left. If terrorists behead defenseless captives on videotape, it's simply an expression of their culture. But if a handful of U.S. troops play an ugly round of Candid Camera, that's a new gulag.

As someone who takes human rights seriously, I'm appalled by the lack of sympathy the left feels toward the victims of any regime other than the Bush administration. Let's shout it to prisoners everywhere: If you're not harmed by an American, your suffering doesn't count.
The left's hypocrisy is immeasurable. The grandchildren of those who defended Stalin are mortified that Saddam Hussein will stand trial. By taking such irresponsible voices seriously, we grant our critics a strength they otherwise lack and simply help them keep their lies alive.

Columnist Mark Steyn also weighed in the Gitmo Crock:

Gitmo has the distinction of being "a camp where the medical staff outnumber the prisoners." You'll get swifter, cleaner and more efficient treatment than most Canadians do under socialized health care. It's the only gulag in history where the detainees leave in better health and weighing more than when they arrive.

June 2005 became the battleground for truth and the Democrats were off to an early start laying the foundations of defeat for President Bush after they secured the defeat of America at a time of war. It would be months later before the President choose to take this issue head on. Meanwhile, the danger lurked, as Ayn Rand put it:

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology. ~ Ayn Rand

Also a topic in June was the "True Face of Radical Islam" featuring videos and transcripts from Arab television across the region. The favorite is this clip found at Little Green Footballs: Saudi cleric discussing how monkeys stoning adulterous female partners is an apt lesson for Moslems today.

Also instructive into the mind of radical Moslems in the United States is this post in the wake of the Durban/Gulag mess. Videotaped by the protestors themselves, a group of Moslems in New York burn and trample an American flag and one proclaims on a megaphone that the goal of Islam is "To dominate all other religions, to dominate the United States, to dominate the world." In case CNNABCNBCCBS didn't share the video of this revealing event: here it is courtesy of Swanky Conservative . NOTE: If video does not load, visit Swanks primary post page (page down to post which does not display at top, and click link in first paragraph) You will not believe the video.

Remembering The Gipper, One Year Later

With the Defeat America campaign in full swing, June was a busy month. But not to busy to remember the one year anniversary of the passing of one of the greatest President's of the 20th Century.

One of my favorite photographs of President Reagan is the one that I took in Perrysburg, Ohio in 1984 during one of the last "whistlestop" campaign appearances. The train car, the Ferdinand Magellan was originally designed for FDR and was known as "Car One" when the President was on board. Somehow today's bus tours don't have the same magic.

The confirmation of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations was also a hot topic for June. In this post I link to the following video that Democrats were showing as proof that Bolton was unsuited for the job. He was just SOOOO mean to the euroweanies. I loved every minute of it. The euroweanie droning on in that stuffy tone about the founders of the UN "turning over in their graves" was a hoot! No doubt the UN's founders ARE turning over in their graves witnessing the utter corruption and complete uselessness of the institution they put so much effort into founding.

More on the Useless UN from a former communist spy master whose career was dedicated to transforming that institution into a tool for communist victory. He rightly asserts that if anyone can clean up the mess, it would be Bolton.

June was such a busy month, but I would be remiss if I did not include the Washington Post expose on the real Senator Byrd of West Virginia: Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan or the $30 million in taxpayer dollars given as grants to the George Soros foundation or the Principal of a Georgia school who refused to allow one of our soldiers to speak to a class of students and actually had the man removed from school property as a threat.

Lastly, June also saw one of the early mentions of a Democrat plan to impeach President Bush. This lame attempt to divert the nation at a time of war may be picking up steam again.

And if all of the above is just too much to contemplate, just invoke the bunny: