Comments on FunkyPundit: On Democrat Rhetoric

David, I haven't argued against checks and balance...

2007-02-13T19:11:00.000-05:00

David, I haven't argued against checks and balances. Congressmen are free to speak as they please. And while the Constitution quite clearly vests foreign policy responsibilities in the executive -- as the Founders well understood, war can't be fought by committee -- there's nothing stopping Congress from critiquing as they please.

I also haven't argued here that criticism is somehow bad.

Beyond those two objections, you seem to have missed the larger point altogether. Of course you cannot quantify precisely how a particular statement will affect the relative strength of an adversarial military force.

My assertion, rather, is that rhetoric has a larger impact on the war effort than these pols apparently realize. It's untestable only insofar as your apparent unwillingness to consider your own opinions.

What I mean is this: What, honestly, would your immediate reaction have been had those quotes been real? That America was bogged down in an unwinnable war? That Iraq's a quagmire? Doubt it. If insurgents spoke in the same cynical fashion as most Democrats -- calling for phased withdrawals, immediate redeployments, etc. -- certainly you wouldn't think we were hopeless?

Plainly, America cannot win a war such as this without public support. And the public's support rests almost entirely upon the plausibility of success, which, essentially, is the inverse of the enemy's chances. If we, for whatever reason, believe the insurgents will leave Iraq in June, would that not seem to speak favorably of America's chances?

We'd all prefer no rhetorical fetters whatsoever. But the reality simply doesn't allow for it. Congressmen -- or, at the very least, those who voted in favor of the war -- who have something critical to say of how the war is being conducted ought to express themselves behind closed doors. That should be the least they can do -- that is, not worsen their constituents' security.

Professional officers in the military will tell yo...

2007-02-13T17:02:00.000-05:00

Professional officers in the military will tell you that the military is an instrument of American foreign policy. That is one of the themes driven home during officer indoctrination. If the consensus is that the policy is poorly conceived then criticism is not out of line, especially when the legislature is criticizing the executive. It comes from that all-american notion of checks and balances.

If you haven't noticed, in the past year, several flag level officers in the acquisition chain have suffered ignomonious removal from office for can-do-ing themselves into situations that they really shouldn't have been doing in the first place. This is the same kind of military leadership that promises to lead the mission in Iraq, and in which the flags have zero chance of dying in.

You make an untestable assertion about how the enemy is emboldened, and then assert that it causes more damage that huge policy errors (completely misunderstanding the nature of the war). Could you, for the record, estimate the number of insurgent attacks that would have been prevented from scaled down, or eliminated rhetoric? How many soldiers do you estimate would not have died if the rhetoric wasn't as sharp? Based on extensive understanding of US operations and the general length of wars in the Middle East, how about how long ago would the conflict have been concluded?

You are a pseudo-intellectual, so much as the people that you accuse (I can't defend them, either).

Too true. Sadly, the dems' pathological self hate...

2007-02-12T19:04:00.000-05:00

Too true. Sadly, the dems' pathological self hate (i.e., "America sucks!") won't allow them to really root for the U.S. with their whole hearts. They believe we deserve a good smack down to learn some kind of karmic "lesson" for being so successful with the whole freedom, free enterprise, best country thing we have going on.