Our Holiday

[Geee]

American Thinker:

The left long has loathed our military. During the 1960s, students on campuses supported by blue collar taxpayers vilified the sons of these steelworkers and truck drivers who were fighting and dying in Vietnam. An entire television series, M*A*S*H, was constructed around the venality of career soldiers and the nobility of conscripted doctors who thought that fighting the father of Kim Jong-Il was somehow morally wrong. Most of us have known brave American servicemen who were spat upon and mocked when they came home on leave from Vietnam. This was, some Americans once thought, the residue of an unhappy war in Southeast Asia which ended four decades ago.

The politicians that spoke most contemptuously of American troops in Vietnam were leftist Democrats. Bill Clinton, the draft dodger president, famously wrote of loathing the military. Listen to John Kerry despicably defame the conduct of American troops in Vietnam. After Desert Storm, after Enduring Freedom, has anything changed? No. Watch the Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin describe our men and women in uniform in Iraq behaving like Nazis or Gulag guards. See Congressman John Murtha, who was almost the Democrat Floor Leader, condemn United States Marines at Haditha without so much as a hearing. Hear what Barack Obama said in 2007 about American forces razing villages and killing civilians. These are not the wild comments of rogue politicians. This is the face of the Democrat Party.

As Jeanne Kirkpatrick put in more than thirty years ago, describing the left's pathological hatred of America: "They always blame America first." The reasons are not hard to understand. American exceptionalism, that virtue which Prime Minister Netanyahu so recently described as a companion to Israeli exceptionalism, means that the two forces which proceeded from opposite direction into the foul heart of the Reich in 1944 were just as opposite in their moral purpose. American and British troops came to liberate people and Soviet troops came to re-enslave people. When American troops go to Iraq and to Afghanistan, it is also as liberators and not oppressors. Only someone so blinded with hatred of America could think otherwise.