Myopia Isn't Free

The other day, I chided the New Patriot blog, tongue firmly in cheek (or as every leftyblog in the world woul say, I "served" them) for its low output and infrequent posting, despite having nine contributors.

Today, evidence that paucity can be a good thing:

On Saturday, a couple parked their pickup truck in front of my house. It had a prominent "Freedom Isn't Free" decal with an American flag on the back window. This is an interesting slogan, and it got me thinking. It exploits the dual meaning of "free" in English: free, as in liberty; and free, as in price. (This dual meaning has given the Free Software Foundation no end of trouble.) In this era of bumper-sticker politics, this one happens to have quite a bit of truth to it. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

So far, so good.

However, the more immediate meaning of this bumper sticker is support for the war in Iraq.

Not quite sure that follows; it's an assumption that requires a "dumpbachmann"-level presumption of motive.

And that is where I part company with the people who display it. Now that we are bogged down there, I wish every day for a quick and graceful exit. "Peace with honor" is imbued with negative connotations of Vietnam, but that's what I hope for.

In other words, Luke Francl hopes for a myth, and the extermination of legions of inconvenient brown people.

Dunno how old Luke Francl was in 1975. Me? I was 12, but paid lots of attention to the news. It didn't take a 12 year old rocket scientist to see what "peace" with "honor" led to; millions of dead, inconvenient yellow people. "Peace with honor" was a slogan, adopted because it played in Peoria better than "flight with genocide". It's a genocide - really several genocides, in Cambodia and the Central Highlands and Laos - that the left admits existed only in the most sterile, clinical possible terms to this very day.

There is now little question that Iraq posed no threat to the United States. We had Saddam contained; he had no ties to Al Qaeda; and he had no weapons of mass destruction.

Do you suppose that if we took up a collection, we could pay Kos to update his stock of memes? Because they don't get any better with age.

Form the top, take 2653: "containment" is a meaningless concept when it comes to terror, the ties with Quaeda are murky (go figure - terrorists and all), every significant government in the world believed he had WMD including the nations that supplied him with their precursors, etc, etc.

Thousands of people who would today be alive have died because the Bush administration couldn't leave well enough alone;

Couldn't leave "well enough" alone - where "well enough" equalled mass murder, children's prisons, rape camps, plastic shredders, hands pounded with hammers, tongues cut out...

...again, things that the left never really cares about; their spokesman, Michael Moore, thought pre-war Iraq no more sinister than Minneapolis on a Sunday afternoon, and believes the head-sawing thugs to be "minutemen".

Well enough.

... and that being so, still failed to plan adequately for the aftermath.

There's one of the left's great conceits; as long as you have a plan, all will be well.

The saying is "no plan survives its first contact with the enemy". It's a cliche; it became a cliche because it's so true, so often.

The only plan that matters was, and is: "depose the Hussein regime, establish democracy". Beyond that, it's all just details.

We are suffering the consequences to this day, and we will continue to suffer them for many years to come.

Right. But leave aside the fact that many of those consequences are good for a moment; we can not know what the consequences of not having acted against Hussein or especially terrorism in general would have been - although we can divine some wisdom from the fact that there have been no more significant attacks against the US in almost four years.

To the left, the obvious conclusion would seem to be "of course not! There never would have been, either!". To the rest of us, it seems possible our actions and the relative peace at home might possibly be linked.

Let's see if Luke is going to go for the trifecta:

If Saddam was no threat, there was no need to pay for our freedom from him.

Shack! A dubious assertion, based on a false assumption that was not known to have had a basis in fact in 2002-3, and the third leg of the trifecta, the fact-challenged snark:

People are paying, though. But for whose freedom?

Inconvenient brown-skinned Iraqi and Afghan people.

Do they count?

Freedom isn't free. It's also not always convenient, clear-cut or painless.

Posted by Mitch at June 13, 2005 05:42 AM | TrackBack