Bimbo Diplomacy and the Democrat Agenda

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
April 12, 2007

Yon Nancy has a lean and hungry look . . . uh, and a damn stupid one, to boot.
As amateurish and ill-advised as Nancy Pelosi's highly publicized meetings with the leaders of Israel and Syria were, the real problem with her recent disastrous foray into diplomatic territory normally reserved for experienced hands at the State Department is that she might not be smart enough to realize what a blunder she's committed. Indeed, given that the Democrats have all along recognized the legitimacy of terrorist states such as Iran and North Korea, she and her fellow useful idiots on the left might simply be oblivious to the enormity of her gaffe.

In fact, Pelosi's Middle East trip, during which she misrepresented the positions of both the United States and Israel (why are we surprised?) with regard to dealing with Syria, is very likely part of a larger Democrat strategy to usurp the power of the office of the Presidency as well as that of the Department of State, and to bring both under the aegis of the Democratically controlled legislature.

How else explain Pelosi's attempt to engage in international diplomacy in the Middle East while her colleagues in the House and Senate wrangled to micromanage the War in Iraq through budgetary chicanery of the most dangerous sort?

The sin of hubris, or excessive pride, is at the root of many classical and Shakespearean tragedies, including Julius Caesar, from which the slightly altered quote that leads off this article was filched. And as dramatic characters so often come to tragic ends as a result of prideful overreaching, so might the Democrats find, with the electoral equivalent of tragic results, that their attempted arrogation of presidential and diplomatic authority does not sit well with the American electorate.
The very fact that Dems feel the need to so dramatically overreach the bounds of their power is an indication that they are dealing, bottom line, from a position of weakness. It remains to be seen whether the fact that their efforts — Pelosi's in particular — have earned them ridicule and censure even in such normally safe leftist bastions as the pages of the Washington Post will cause them to step back and reconsider their strategy. In the meantime, it is instructive to review the implications of their recent legislative and diplomatic follies.

Democrats managed to engineer a pork-laden $123.2 billion "defense spending" bill, replete with arbitrary deadlines for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, although the bill has yet to be sent to the President, who has promised to veto it. Indeed, the bill faced certain legislative defeat initially, and was passed only through Democrats' trading, on a broad scale, pork dollars for their party-mates' votes.

The bill's passage represents one of the most cynical attempts in my memory of a political party, in this case the Democrats, attempting to pass off as representative of lawmakers' commitment to end the War in Iraq a piece of legislation that was bought and paid for through what amounts to nothing less than political bribery. It gives new meaning to the word "shameless."

But for Dems, "shameless" has become the behavioral norm and "cynicism" the currency of the realm. Nancy Pelosi declared, shortly after she ascended officially to the position of Speaker of the House earlier this year, "We will not cut off funding for the troops." Both Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer have also said unequivocally that Democrats are never going to cut off funding for American forces in Iraq.
In the face of such declarations, then, what do we make of their toying with our troops' well-being by attempting to ram through legislation that will have precisely the same effect as cutting off funding, but without the political price? Because that is exactly what they're trying to do by setting legislative timelines for troop withdrawal from Iraq.

It is cynicism elevated to an art form. Out of one side of their mouths they proclaim their patriotism by declaring that they'll never cut off funding for the troops, while out of the other they craft legislation that would have precisely the same effect that cutting off funding would have.

My sense is that, in the end, Dems will not be able to have it both ways. They won't be able in fact to promote a pro-terrorist, anti-American legislative and diplomatic agenda, while at the same time attempting to pull the wool over the American public's eyes with their cynical declarations of patriotic intent.

In the final analysis, you either recognize that Islamist terrorism is a threat to western democracy, to our very way of life, or you don't. Bottom line, you either come down on the side of the only legitimate strategy for preserving democracy — which is to aggressively attack terrorism in all of its forms and on terrorist turf — or you come down on the side of giving in to terrorism, of ceding our very civilization to forces that would reduce it to rubble while rejoicing that the agents of darkness and nihilism have triumphed.

Because, make no mistake, the longer we wait before we continue, as we have in Afghanistan and Iraq, to expand the attack against the forces of terrorism as they are currently embodied in rogue states such as Iran and Syria, the greater the risk we run that they will gain the military strength — particularly in the form of nuclear weaponry, but also as ongoing safe havens for terrorist organizations — that might well enable them to cripple the institutions of western civilization.

And lest you think that's a dramatic overstatement of the case, consider what a terrorist state such as Iran might well be able to do to capitalist democratic governmental and economic institutions if it were producing nuclear weapons and wielding them in sponsoring nuclear terrorism against the west. Imagine a nuclear Iran arming Islamist terrorists and directing them in the commission of acts of nuclear terrorism against the United States and other capitalist democracies.

We have only to look back at the dramatic (although, thankfully, relatively short-lived) economic consequences of the 9/11 attacks to understand that, while our wonderfully robust and resilient capitalist economy was equal to that challenge, it is not a stretch to envision more dire terrorist attacks exacting a more damaging toll. It's not beyond comprehension to envision Islamist nuclear terrorists bringing down, piece by piece, the enormously complex infrastructure that has evolved to support our capitalist and democratic institutions.

But beyond that, we're being terminally naive if we think that that is not what Islamo-fascists — and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in particular — have as their goal. Islamists' very raison d'etre is to eliminate from our planet any vestige of the political, economic, and religious institutions built by Christian capitalist "infidels" and to replace them with their despotic fundamentalist Islamic counterparts.
For so many of our political leaders not to grasp the import of the struggle against the tyrannical forces of Islam that we are currently engaged in is tantamount to signing a death warrant for western Christian democracy. This is because the United States has become — in the face of, especially, European democracies' shameful vitiation of their duty to uphold the principles on which they were founded — the primary defender of religious and political liberty in the world.

To return to the Julius Caesar analogy with which this piece began: You'll recall that in Shakespeare's play Caesar goes on to say about Cassius that "He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." Unlike Cassius, Nancy Pelosi — although she is surely no less dangerous to western democracy than Cassius was to Caesar — thinks too little and understands even less, especially given the position to which she's risen. She appears to have taken the idea that she's third in line for the Presidency a bit too seriously.

On the positive side, though, she's certainly given us an inkling of how Democrats would likely handle diplomatic relations with terrorist nations, which is to say, they will cave in to them, much as the nations of the European Union have done.
That may end up being the greatest service Nancy Pelosi could provide to our country, for when the American electorate digest the implications of what the Democrats are attempting to do legislatively and diplomatically, they are likely to come to understand that, if we give Democrats any more rope than we've given them already, they're likely to hang not just themselves but the whole of western civilization. That, simply put, is more than we can risk.