Playing With Fire
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
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Congressman Tom Lantos, who is a member of the delegation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading to Syria, put the mission clearly when he said: "We have an alternative Democratic foreign policy."
Democrats can have any foreign policy they want -- if and when they are elected to the White House.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, right, is welcomed by Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, left, upon her arrival at the Lebanese government house in Beirut, Lebanon, on Monday April 2, 2007. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Lebanese officials Monday on a stop in Beirut as part of a fact-finding trip to the Middle East that has drawn criticism from the White House because it includes a visit to neighboring Syria. Pelosi's visit to Lebanon comes amid sharp political divisions in the country between the government and the opposition. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla) Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and -- like him or not -- he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.
All that Pelosi's trip can accomplish is to advertise American disunity to a terrorist-sponsoring nation in the Middle East while we are in a war there. That in turn can only embolden the Syrians to exploit the lack of unified resolve in Washington by stepping up their efforts to destabilize Iraq and the Middle East in general.
Members of the opposition party, whichever party that might be at a given time, knew that their role was not to intervene abroad themselves to undermine this country's foreign policy, however much they might criticize it at home.
During the Second World War, the defeated Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, even acted as President Roosevelt's personal envoy to British Prime Minister Churchill.
He understood that we were all in this together, however we might disagree among ourselves about the best course to follow.
Today, Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats are stepping in to carry out their own foreign policy and even their own military policy on troop deployment -- all the while denying that they are intruding on the president's authority.
They are doing the same thing domestically by making a big media circus over the fact that the Bush administration fired eight U.S. attorneys. These attorneys are among the many officials who serve at the pleasure of the president -- which means that they can be fired at any time for any reason or for no reason.
That is why there was no big hullabaloo in the media when Bill Clinton fired all the U.S. attorneys across the country -- even though that got rid of the U.S. attorneys who were conducting an on-going investigation into corruption in Clinton's own administration as governor of Arkansas.
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