Stephanie
Diamond Member
- Jul 11, 2004
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Democrats outshout their voice of reason ajc.com
Published on: 11/20/05
On Sunday evening last, sharing a birthday celebration at a Vietnamese restaurant on Buford Highway, I am struck anew with a profound sense of guilt.
It has started before, while strolling through the Vietnamese bakery next door, looking at the friendly faces of diners. Many who look my way are old enough to have experienced the war.
My impulse, resisted, is to go to them and ask: Do you still feel our betrayal?
Next door, a young woman, 30 or 35, thoroughly Americanized in manner, shape and dress, walks past with a child, a girl of 8 or 10, so wholly and completely American that she could never find comfort or peace in the land of her grandparents' birth.
Just as I am anguished by the betrayal that brought her here, I am abidingly grateful to live in a nation that received them with the promise that they could in every sense become one of us, equally entitled to ascend to the reaches of their labors and abilities.
To have betrayed them is one crime. To have held them to a caste system, as France is revealed to have done to immigrants from former colonies, would have been an injustice so indecent as to bring shame to those who share the ideals of our Founding Fathers.
Once this nation makes a commitment, as it has done in promising an opportunity for freedom to the people of Iraq, those who accept our word as moral contract are no longer abstractions. They are flesh-and-blood people who look into our eyes and into our national character, assessing our will and our values.
Ultimately, they look into our hearts to determine whether having taken that step into danger that we cajoled, we are there to cover their back.
For us, it is the moment that defines the worth of our Constitution, that defines this generation's relationship with the dead and those who fought and sacrificed for the liberties we profess.
Last week was a defining moment as well in our national discussion about Iraq. It started promisingly enough with a thoughtful speech by U.S. Sen. Joe
Lieberman (D-Conn.), during a debate over the defense authorization bill. But it grew ugly, and dangerous.
That's because the national Democratic Party has retreated to its core — and on national security matters, that is the embittered anti-war left.
As now configured, this is a party that cannot be trusted when the nation is at risk. Its blindness to evil will get people hurt. It will, by its fixation on poll numbers, say to the people of Iraq who have trusted our word, that it is a pledge written on insufficient funds. It will, as was the case with the 200,000 rebellious Shiites that Saddam Hussein slaughtered in the aftermath of Desert Storm, leave Iraq exposed to the vengeful brutality of unchecked evil.
This party rushes to hide its pacifism and its relativism in single file behind imagery — first the "peace mom" radical Cindy Sheehan and, when she was spent, behind the valor of U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam veteran who last week provided cover to his anti-war colleagues by declaring, "It's time to bring the troops home."
It is left, then, to Lieberman, Al Gore's vice presidential candidate in 2000, to spark any ray of hope that the party of FDR and Harry Truman has not become a backward-looking party that can't be trusted with liberty's franchise.
"The questions raised about prewar intelligence are not irrelevant . . . but they are nowhere as important and relevant as how we successfully complete our mission in Iraq and protect the 150,000 men and women in uniform who are fighting for us there," Lieberman said.
"The danger is that by spending so much time on the past here, we contribute to a drop in public support. Terrorists know that they cannot defeat us in Iraq, but they also know they can defeat us in America by breaking the will and steadfast support of the American people for this cause."
That is the voice of the Democratic Party America once embraced. It is the voice of the Democratic Party that held the South. It is the voice of a party America can trust when our people are threatened.
But it is not the voice that now dominates — and defines — today's national Democratic Party. That voice will get defenders hurt and trusting souls betrayed.
Wow is all I can say. And yet so true that the Democrats have let us down again on national integrity,security and commitments.
— Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays
Published on: 11/20/05
On Sunday evening last, sharing a birthday celebration at a Vietnamese restaurant on Buford Highway, I am struck anew with a profound sense of guilt.
It has started before, while strolling through the Vietnamese bakery next door, looking at the friendly faces of diners. Many who look my way are old enough to have experienced the war.
My impulse, resisted, is to go to them and ask: Do you still feel our betrayal?
Next door, a young woman, 30 or 35, thoroughly Americanized in manner, shape and dress, walks past with a child, a girl of 8 or 10, so wholly and completely American that she could never find comfort or peace in the land of her grandparents' birth.
Just as I am anguished by the betrayal that brought her here, I am abidingly grateful to live in a nation that received them with the promise that they could in every sense become one of us, equally entitled to ascend to the reaches of their labors and abilities.
To have betrayed them is one crime. To have held them to a caste system, as France is revealed to have done to immigrants from former colonies, would have been an injustice so indecent as to bring shame to those who share the ideals of our Founding Fathers.
Once this nation makes a commitment, as it has done in promising an opportunity for freedom to the people of Iraq, those who accept our word as moral contract are no longer abstractions. They are flesh-and-blood people who look into our eyes and into our national character, assessing our will and our values.
Ultimately, they look into our hearts to determine whether having taken that step into danger that we cajoled, we are there to cover their back.
For us, it is the moment that defines the worth of our Constitution, that defines this generation's relationship with the dead and those who fought and sacrificed for the liberties we profess.
Last week was a defining moment as well in our national discussion about Iraq. It started promisingly enough with a thoughtful speech by U.S. Sen. Joe
Lieberman (D-Conn.), during a debate over the defense authorization bill. But it grew ugly, and dangerous.
That's because the national Democratic Party has retreated to its core — and on national security matters, that is the embittered anti-war left.
As now configured, this is a party that cannot be trusted when the nation is at risk. Its blindness to evil will get people hurt. It will, by its fixation on poll numbers, say to the people of Iraq who have trusted our word, that it is a pledge written on insufficient funds. It will, as was the case with the 200,000 rebellious Shiites that Saddam Hussein slaughtered in the aftermath of Desert Storm, leave Iraq exposed to the vengeful brutality of unchecked evil.
This party rushes to hide its pacifism and its relativism in single file behind imagery — first the "peace mom" radical Cindy Sheehan and, when she was spent, behind the valor of U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a Vietnam veteran who last week provided cover to his anti-war colleagues by declaring, "It's time to bring the troops home."
It is left, then, to Lieberman, Al Gore's vice presidential candidate in 2000, to spark any ray of hope that the party of FDR and Harry Truman has not become a backward-looking party that can't be trusted with liberty's franchise.
"The questions raised about prewar intelligence are not irrelevant . . . but they are nowhere as important and relevant as how we successfully complete our mission in Iraq and protect the 150,000 men and women in uniform who are fighting for us there," Lieberman said.
"The danger is that by spending so much time on the past here, we contribute to a drop in public support. Terrorists know that they cannot defeat us in Iraq, but they also know they can defeat us in America by breaking the will and steadfast support of the American people for this cause."
That is the voice of the Democratic Party America once embraced. It is the voice of the Democratic Party that held the South. It is the voice of a party America can trust when our people are threatened.
But it is not the voice that now dominates — and defines — today's national Democratic Party. That voice will get defenders hurt and trusting souls betrayed.
Wow is all I can say. And yet so true that the Democrats have let us down again on national integrity,security and commitments.
— Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays
