Hillary's Selective Reading of History

The NY Post (motto: "The paper for the 20% of New Yorkers who hate Hillary") today calls the Junior Senator from the Empire State (lately from there, at least) on her selective quotation of Democrat patron saint FDR.

Her quotation was from a speech that the lesser Roosevelt delivered two days after Pearl Harbor:

We are now in this war. We are all in it, all the way. Every man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.

This, of course, Hillary offered as the usual Democrat critique of Bush's War on Terrorism. In their book, there has only been one good war in the history of the Republic, the one led by FDR that involved a large-scale draft, conversion of industry to manufacture war materiel, wage and price controls (largely the root of the present crisis in health insurance, by the way) and rationing of every imaginable consumer product. For the party of Nancy and Hillary, that's the way to fight a war, of course, minus maybe the internment of an ethnic group too closely identified with an enemy nation.

Gentle readers my recall the classic moment at the end of The Simpsons Season One episode, "Bart the General" in which Bart, victor in a war against bullies, disclaims that war is bad with the exception of a short list of good wars, including the war of the original Star Wars trilogy. The Ds have apparently sharpened and narrowed Bart's reasoning to make it dogma.

The Post nicely points out that on that occasion cited by Ms. Rodham-Clinton, FDR went on to state the following:

The United States can accept no result save victory, final and complete . . . The sources of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken . . . We're going to fight it with everything we got.

That, of course, is not the program offered by the Pantsuit Party. Instead, they're offering a timetable for withdrawal. There's not commitment to total mobilization here, just a commitment to quit no matter what happens.

So we'll recommend that the Ds drop this lame trope, as even the most uncritical thinkers in the American electorate will be able to sort it out.

We'll recommend further that someone in the media point out that the execution of "total war" is actually quite rare in the history of this Republic or most other nations. Relatively low level conflicts have been more the norm. In fact, a good case can be made that nations like ours find themselves facing total war only when they stubbornly or blindly refuse to deal more proactively, even preemptively, with growing threats, either by force or diplomacy (the latter seldom effective without the serious threat of force).

We'll spell this out for the strategically challenged: the big picture in Iraq was not a war to secure the WMD (always a question mark related to justification before the UN) but a smaller war now to prevent a bigger war later. The choice was between a conflict less deadly and damaging now versus one much more deadly and damaging later.

Since Victory Gardens and scrap metal drives wouldn't help much with Iraq, why does the Hildabeast call for them? And since Petraeus's anti-insurgent campaign is yielding immediate and obvious results, why does she oppose it? Voters can figure out the political doublespeak here.