THE facts about your security are being torn to shreds by activist liars. And they think that you’re too stupid to know the difference.
Countless aspects of the Bush-Cheney administration deserve merciless criticism. But fair is fair: Since 9/11, we haven’t suffered a single successful terrorist attack on our homeland. Not one.
Explain to me, please, how this shows we’re less safe. What factual measurement applies, other than the absence of attacks?
God knows, the terrorists desperately wanted to strike our homeland. And they couldn’t. Are we supposed to believe that was an accident?
Whopper No. 3: Success in Iraq is an illusion – the surge failed. Folks, this is something only a New York Times columnist could believe.
Every single significant indicator, from Iraqi government progress through the performance of Iraqi security forces to the plummeting level of violence, has changed for the better – remarkably so.
If current trend-lines continue, it may not be long before Baghdad is safer for Iraqi citizens than the Washington-Baltimore metroplex is for US citizens. Iraq’s government is working, its economy is booming – and its military has driven the concentrations of terrorists and militia from every one of Iraq’s major cities.
And our troops are coming home. Where’s the failure?
Whopper No. 5: The US-European relationship is a disaster. In fact, Washington and the major European capitals have built new, sturdier bridges to replace old ones that badly needed burning.
The Europeans grudgingly figured out that they need us – as we need them. The big break in 2003 cleared a lot of bad air (there was no break with Europe’s young democracies). Relations today are sounder than they were in the fiddle-while-Rome-burns Clinton era.
Oh, and NATO has become a serious military alliance – fighting in Afghanistan, patrolling the high seas and conducting special operations against terrorists. The Germans announced this week that they’re sending another thousand troops to Afghanistan. France is re-engaging with NATO’s military side. Where’s the disaster, mon ami?
Whopper No. 6: As president, Barack Obama would bring positive change to our foreign policy– and John McCain’s too old to get it.
Hmm: Take a gander at Obama’s senior foreign-policy advisers: Madeleine Albright (71), Warren Christopher (82), Anthony Lake (69), Lee Hamilton (77), Richard Clarke (57) . . .
If you added up their ages and fed the number into a time-machine, you’d land in Europe in the middle of the Black Death.
More important: These are the people whose watch saw the first attack on the World Trade Center, Mogadishu, Rwanda, the Srebrenica massacre, a pass for the Russians on Chechnya, the Khobar Towers bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the near-sinking of the USS Cole – oh, and the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
You couldn’t assemble a team in Washington with more strategic failures to its credit.
Whopper No. 7: Our troops are all coming home as psychos victimized by their participation in military atrocities.