The Goalposts Move Again

I watched, dumfounded, as Jed Babbin and Congressperson Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) had what may have been the most surreal segment I've ever seen.

Family errands precluded my blogging about it until now - but fortunately Ed was on the stick, and posts the money shot from the transcript.

This part is had me actually shouting at the TV:

BABBIN:...The President has it right, and with all due respect, Congresswoman, you have it so vastly, vastly wrong, it's hard to even begin to describe. People have been asking, the President has been asking the international community to come in and help in Iraq for almost two years now. The fact is that no matter how much wishful thinking we have, they're not going to come! We can go to the UN until the cows come home, and these people are not going to send in humanitarian relief, they're not going to send in engineers, they're not going to pay for things. These people have abandoned democracy, and to say that we're going to have some sort of miraculous recovery at the United Nations or that the eunuchs of Old Europe will come riding to our rescue is simply disingenuous.

W: Well, I disagree with you. Actually, I believe that if we, ah, remove our military presence, and are there as members of a multinational, um, peacekeeping organization, then the other countries will come forward. Actually, I heard an interview with a leader in France saying that's exactly what they would be pleased to do.

B: If I could jump back in there for a minute, you're saying that Iraq's neighbors are going to come in and help? Syria and Iran, which are backing the insurgency? I mean, you can't seriously suggest that the neighboring nations are going to come to the aid of Iraq when they're doing everything they can in desperation to try to prevent democracy!

W: Part of that, I believe, has a lot to do with our military presence, the United States looking like occupiers. Now that this election is behind us, we should help the Iraqi people put their government together for the Iraqi people. But that means we don't put together the infrastructure through US corporations so that Halliburton makes all the profit and the benefit instead of the Iraqi people.

Ah. If it only weren't for our military, the insurgents would pack up and go home.

I'm having flashbacks to the eighties, when my "peace" activist classmates sincerely believed that if we only pulled our troops out of Western Europe, the Russians would leave East Germany and Poland.

Some things - like the wishful ignorance of the far, far left - never change.

Posted by Mitch at January 30, 2005 07:54 PM | TrackBack