Shock: Majority Of Democrats Finally Admit To Wanting An American Defeat

The shock isn't that they feel this way; we've long known.

The shock is that the media has been so sympathetic to this position that liberals finally feel comfortable enough to admit it.

Fox asked, “Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?� 51% of Democrats answered “No� to that question. 40% answered yes, and 9%, who are still apparently trying to determine just how deranged they are by their Bush hatred, answered “I don’t know.�

Let me quote again Gary Kamiya, writing in Salon, after the Fall of Baghdad, ca. April 9, 2003. He titles, or teases, the second page of this hateful screed with the words Those of us who opposed the war have been driven to moral schizophrenia. Schizophrenia or psychopathy?

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness -- ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. If this is true, then it would be better for bad things to happen to Bush.

Emphasis added.

Well, when that disgusting, shameful confession was printed, there were two main sorts of respones by liberals: Honest responses by liberals, praising him for his "courage" in writing what many of them felt, and dishonest responses by liberals, claiming this is just One Lone Nut who doesn't speak for the majority of the Demcoratic Party.

51%. Fifty. Fucking. One. Percent.

Are they going to still claim this is a "fringe" voice?

How many of them secretly wished the mass bombing of planes had actually worked, and killed up to 3000 people, just to avoid the "greater moral negative" of Bush seeming to be successful in thwarting terrorism?

Think that's crazy? Well, look back at the quote above. There's Kamiya admitting he'd hoped for greater American military casualties just to keep Bush from garnering too much political capital from the war.

Thanks to Allah, who notes the Rove Confabulated Fake Terror Scare is already working, with Connecticut voters losing enthusiasm for Mr. Jane Hamsher, I mean, Ned Lamont, and that 23 episodes of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! are now available, in their entirety, at Google videos.

He recommends the PETA episode. So do I. And the bottled water/health scare episode? Watch that too.

PS: When I say "Dishonest liberals claim" that this is just "One Lone Nut," that's what I mean. I don't mean to imply that all liberals want the War on Terror to fail just so they can get a President in the White House. I've personally witnessed liberals -- even left-liberals -- arguing quite heatedly with fellow liberals on similar points. I suspect the heat there was partly due to how incredbily political damaging this sort of talk is for the left, but there was genuine revulsion over the sentiment itself.

However: Those liberals who have for so longed claimed this was merely a "fringe" position, having nothing to do with mainstream liberals or the Democratic Party, only a phenomenon of the fringe anarchist ultraleft?

You are liars. You always have been. You've heard your fellow liberals say just this sort of thing, frequently. 51% of Democrats -- not even just liberals! -- cop to believing this. It is simply not credible that you don't encounter such people frequently, or that you have somehow managed to be out of earshot when they were declaring these vile wishes.

You are liars. Period. End of sentence, end of line, end of file.

Update: Jonathan Schnell, another "lone nut," in The Nation:

Or take Jonathan Schell, writing in the Sept. 22 issue of the Nation: "[Democratic Senator Joe] Biden says we must win the war. This is precisely wrong. The United States must learn to lose this war a harder task, in many ways, than winning, for it requires admitting mistakes and relinquishing attractive fantasies. This is the true moral mission of our time."

There's a book out now the liberals like called "The One Percent Doctrine," which is taken, I think, from Cheney's formulation that we must act vigorously against terrorism when there is even a one percent chance of it. (That's the gist, but I may have the details wrong.)

Obviously the book isn't high on the One Percent Doctrine. That's why liberals love it so.

Let me suggest a new doctrine: The Fifty One Percent Doctrine. We must not allow a party to regain power when fifty-one percent of its members admit to wishing for American defeat in battles and misery in economic recession simply to get their candidates in office.

posted by Ace at 04:05 PM

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