Mark Steyn has a way with words, and I really like his descriptions of how Democrats play at national security like a shell game.
That's always a good question to put to the left: where do you draw the line? In America, the Democrats have turned national security into a shell game: whichever war you're fighting is never the right one. Whenever they're mocked as soft on jihad, they say, oh no, that's not true, we think Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan. They demand 200,000 troops in the Hindu Kush to go cave to cave to find Osama's remains. So they're not soft on the war. It's just that the pea isn't under the Iraq cup, it's under the Afghanistan cup. You get the distinct feeling, though, that if you took them at their word and said OK, 200,000 troops go in next Thursday, you'd suddenly discover that the pea was no longer under the Afghanistan cup but under the Sudanese one. That's certainly how it felt in the fall of 2001, when the Democrats were insisting, a week in, that it was an almighty quagmire and the Taliban could never be toppled. As a practical matter, no matter how frantically the left scramble the thimbles, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.
Democrat and Republican politicians are all power-hungry, but at least the Republican route to power involves American victory and defeat for our enemies.
