DÉJÀ VU IN D.C. by By RALPH PETERS
nypost.com
.....The current attacks on President Bush over who knew what and when, over who supposedly lied and the merit of crucial decisions, are based in politics, not in a sincere concern for our national interests. Abraham Lincoln endured nearly identical attacks in an earlier age of mortal threat to our nation.
The repellent personal attacks on the president, the cartoons portraying him as a mentally deficient cowboy stumbling over his own words, call to mind the vicious cartoons of Lincoln as an ape and a hick. Those whom the scribbling classes cannot destroy through the force of argument they mock and caricature. The personal nature of the attacks upon President Bush are indicative of the failure of attacks based upon issues.
And why have the policy-oriented attacks upon the president failed? Primarily because they've attacked the wrong policies.
Perhaps the greatest failing of the intellectual elite and those elements of the media that pander to it is that they consistently underestimate the American people, imagining that the "common" man or woman might be led by the piques and whims of those who never had to sweat for a living and never will.
College professors, journalists or party operatives who assume that the American people are not smart enough to see into the heart of great matters without the guidance of their betters will always be frustrated by the ultimate common sense, moral force and courage of their fellow Americans.
The elite regard the masses as politically incompetent, yet the people consistently have been right when the intellectuals were wrong.
Americans grasp, intuitively and viscerally, that the War Against Terror, of which our campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were vital phases, is as justified as it is essential. It is the elite, imprisoned still in their Clintonian fairy-tale worldview, who refuse to see that the United States remains in mortal danger from enemies who cannot be appeased, persuaded or deflected..... |
