Paradoxically, there was a ballsy sort of feckless courage in his unstudied display of moral cowardice. It made me actually like Dennis more than the calculating Kerry or the hard blowing Howard Dean. The man really was honestly that stupid and short-sighted. He wasn’t just member-massaging his disheveled political base.
It conjured up homey images of a committed Kucinich, smoking his crappy homemade reefer, while CSNY whined out “Find the Cost of Freedom”, as an elegy to the Vietnam War Dead. I didn’t agree with the prescription for disaster Kucinich was selling, but I appreciated where he came from and found him, and still find him now, to be more believable and respectable than either Caligula Rodham Clinton or $400 Salon Cut Johnny Blow-Dry.
However, Kucinich, and the others in his party who pretend to truly believe what he sincerely holds true, are morally wrong. If this was 2002, and we had not taken Saddam Hussein down yet, we would have acquired no responsibility towards Iraq’s future yet. Had Dennis Kucinich successfully mobilized 70,000 anti-war protestors and levitated The Pentagon, I would still have resented him, but his 90 day pullout plan would not have been morally blighted then , the same way it would be now.
To understand the true immorality of the current anti-war movement, I refer the Constant Reader to a letter that the Prime Minister of Cambodia wrote to Henry Kissinger after the United States cut Cambodia loose to discover the cost of freedom’s regrettable absence.
In 1974, a weary Congress cut off funds for Cambodia and South Vietnam, leading to the swift fall of both allies. In his memoir, “Years of Renewal,” Henry Kissinger tells the story of former Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak, who refused to leave his country.
“I thank you very sincerely,” Matak wrote in response, “for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we are all born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].”
Eventually, between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians were murdered by the Khmer Rouge when “peace” came to Indochina. Matak, Kissinger recounts, was shot in the stomach and died three days later.
Dennis comes by his inaccurate and wrong-headed beliefs fairly and honorably. If Caligula, Barack Oprahbama, or Johnny Blow-Dry all want their party’s base to vote in the next election, they had better pretend really hard that they think a lot like Demented Dennis. This is the reality of modern American Liberalism, but it’s a reality that could ultimately damage our nation.
It was a bitter wisdom for Sirik Matak to realize that his fatal mistake that would lead to the hideous termination of his life was to believe in The United States of America. Perhaps because of things like what befell Matak contributed to the push back we got from France, Germany, Russia and Turkey in 2002. Mistakes that lead Prime Ministers to get shot in the gut and spend three days bleeding out don’t often get repeated in fast company.
Democrats along the entire ideological spectrum of the party complain that the Presidency of George W. Bush has caused the rest of the world to hold the United States in a lower esteem. They may be correct on some aspects of their broad and partisan indictment. However, by pursuing an aggressive push to get our troops out of Iraq before the new government can survive, they threaten to do more to undermine the reputation of our great nation than 10,000 refusals by George W. Bush push the ratification of The Kyoto Treaty.
The United States will have incredible military and economic clout for at least the next two decades. That, alone, will not lead other nations to consider us worthy. Honor comes from deeds, not material wealth or lofty statements of principal. The more often people from other lands lie in the ditch gut shot because they screwed up and trusted America, the less the rest of the world will feel America has any honor at all.
If we follow the incessant demand to cut Iraq loose, we run the risk of being seen by the rest of the world as having no honor at all. At that point we only begin to discover the cost of freedom from seeing through our commitments and honoring our responsibilities.
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