by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n The champion of shameless chutzpah has always been the guy who murders his parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he\u2019s an orphan. But White House spokesman Jay Carney might be the new champ, given his response to the House vote not to authorize President Obama\u2019s un-war in Libya: \u201cWe think now is not the time to send the kind of mixed message that it sends when we are working with our allies to achieve the goals that we believe are widely shared in Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n A Democrat like Carney has to be brimming with chutzpah to talk about sending a \u201cmixed message\u201d to our allies and enemies. What did his party do for eight years but undercut with \u201cmixed messages\u201d President Bush\u2019s foreign policy? Bush was \u201cworking with our allies\u201d in Iraq and Afghanistan to pursue the presumably \u201cwidely shared goals\u201d of making us secure by destroying jihadist bases, taking out dysfunctional regimes that facilitated terrorism, and replacing them with democratic governments. And unlike Obama and his Libyan adventure, he obtained Congressional approval for both wars. But once the tin-pot Jacobin Howard Dean gained political traction by exploiting a left-wing-organized anti-war movement, major Democratic politicians felt no compunction in undercutting our efforts, knowing full well that we are fighting an enemy who knows it cannot win on the battlefield, but only by destroying our morale \u2014 precisely the strategy that those \u201cmixed messages\u201d aided and abetted.<\/p>\n In 2007, for example, then-Senator Barack Obama bitterly opposed the \u201csurge\u201d of troops to Iraq that succeeded in turning that conflict around. Channeling the antique \u201cVietnam syndrome,\u201d Obama called the surge a \u201cmistake\u201d and a \u201creckless escalation,\u201d and introduced legislation to remove all US combat forces by the end of March 2008. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent Bush a letter calling the surge \u201ca serious mistake.\u201d Democrats in both houses of Congress introduced non-binding resolutions rejecting the surge. Harry Reid notoriously announced in April 2007 that \u201cthis war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.\u201d Joe Biden agreed a few months later: \u201cWe need to stop the surge and start to get our troops out.\u201d After violence in Iraq declined as a result of the surge and General Petraeus\u2019 counter-insurgency strategy, Senator Dick Durbin accused the General and the President of manipulating statistics, and Senator Hillary Clinton said that the General\u2019s report to Congress required \u201ca willing suspension of disbelief.\u201d<\/p>\n All this came after several years of incessant attacks on President Bush\u2019s foreign policy that undercut the powerful message of renewed American strength and confidence that destroying the Taliban and Hussein\u2019s regime had sent. The nadir of this \u201cmessage\u201d of defeat and doubt came in June 2004, when the Democratic leadership, including Al Gore, Barbara Boxer, Tom Harkin, and Tom Daschle, joyfully attended the premier of\u00a0Fahrenheit 9-11<\/em>, the cinematic libel concocted by left-wing propagandist Michael Moore, who that same month called the terrorists in Iraq \u201cMinutemen\u201d and crowed that their \u201cnumbers will grow, and they will win.\u201d Such cheering for the enemy killing our troops did not disqualify Moore from occupying the seat next to Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention. This \u201cmixed messaging\u201d culminated when the Democrats nominated for president Senator John Kerry, whose thin Senate record included supporting massive cuts to the intelligence budget and pledging to \u201calmost eliminate CIA activity,\u201d not to mention his flip-flop on the war in Iraq he had voted to authorize. And as a candidate, he heartened our enemy by dismissing terrorism as a \u201cnuisance\u201d like prostitution, and by calling the war in Iraq the fruit of \u201cthe most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological foreign policy in modern history.\u201d<\/p>\n And let\u2019s not forget the mother of all mixed messages \u00a0\u2014 newly elected Obama\u2019s \u201capology tour\u201d that dismissed American exceptionalism, donned the hair shirt of contrition for America\u2019s \u201cimperfections,\u201d and groveled before the alleged cultural and religious superiority of Islam. This embrace of weakness and retreat was confirmed in Obama\u2019s foreign policy actions, whether it was abandoning our allies like Poland and Czechoslovakia to curry favor with Russia, anxiously soliciting the favor of the thuggish, WMD-seeking mullahs in Iran, sending diplomatic\u00a0billet-doux<\/em>\u00a0to Syria\u2019s murderous \u201creformer\u201d Bashar al-Assad, alienating and endangering our stalwart ally Israel over some housing construction, abandoning the creepy but useful ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, \u201cleading from behind\u201d in the un-war in Libya, and now announcing to the Taliban and Pakistan that we have a time-certain for skeedaddling from Afghanistan, so all they have to do is wait a bit before rebooting their unholy alliance.<\/p>\n If you want a \u201cmixed message,\u201d look no further. For all his mistakes and arguable aims about creating democracy in the Middle East, George Bush sent a powerful message of American strength and resolve, and a rejection of the American self-doubt, moral weakness, and historical guilt that had convinced the jihadists that American civilization was, as bin Laden put it, \u201cbuilt on foundations of straw,\u201d and so could be defeated by destroying our morale. But for nearly a decade that message has been scrambled by the Democrats and Obama, whose embarrassment about American power and righteousness and doubt about the goodness of our aims and actions have sent a quite different message about America: that the \u201cmincing leviathan,\u201d as Dennis Miller describes the Democrats\u2019 America, doesn\u2019t have the stomach for the all-out fight necessary to destroy jihadism.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The champion of shameless chutzpah has always been the guy who murders his parents then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he\u2019s an orphan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[159,22,196],"tags":[1051,12,311,210,1029,1055,710,1048,197],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-F3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":384,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-bright-and-shining-libyan-lie\/","url_meta":{"origin":2545,"position":0},"title":"A Bright and Shining Libyan Lie","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 25, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Almost everything we have been told about\u00a0Libya\u00a0over the last two years is untrue. A free\u00a0Libya\u00a0was supposed to be proof of President Obama's enlightened reset\u00a0Middle East\u00a0policy. 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So what comes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "International Relations"","block_context":{"text":"International Relations","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/geopolitics\/international-relations\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":390,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-stakes-in-tonights-foreign-policy-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":2545,"position":2},"title":"The Stakes in Tonight’s Foreign Policy Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 22, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Foreign policy, the topic of tonight\u2019s debate, was suddenly thrust into the voters\u2019 consciousness by the murder of 4 Americans, including our ambassador, in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9\/11. Intensifying the fallout of this event has been the Obama administration\u2019s incoherent, clumsy, duplicitous, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":440,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/middle-east-madness\/","url_meta":{"origin":2545,"position":3},"title":"Middle East Madness","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen. 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As Margaret Thatcher said after England\u2019s defeat of Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War, the conflict showed that \u201cnow\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3416,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/foreign-policy-as-wishful-thinking\/","url_meta":{"origin":2545,"position":5},"title":"Foreign Policy as Wishful Thinking","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. 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