it’s too late, baby

Spencer Ackerman, back from being embedded in Iraq, has some words of wisdom for the Democrats:

The uncomfortable reality is this: nothing in Iraq worth fighting for remains achievable, and nothing achievable in Iraq remains worth fighting for [I respectfully disagree: political freedom is always worth fighting for. --ed.] Democrats have made the decision—rightly, I think—that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, “I don’t want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission.” This matters, because pretending that in ending the war they’re doing the troops a favor hurts Democrats politically. They risk looking condescending, and, worse, oblivious—which has the broader effect of undermining public trust in the Democrats to handle national security. …

Democrats would do much better to speak honestly: to acknowledge that many fighting men and women want to stay in the battle and would be willing to do so for years longer. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, nor in emphasizing that this is part of what makes us so proud of our military. We wouldn’t want soldiers who were unwilling to fight to the bitter end.

The Dems won’t listen, because their base clearly isn’t proud of our military. The military doesn’t do dialogue, you see. It kills people (more than 650,000 Iraqis along, according to the ignorant but representative rabidly partisan Democrat Rosie O’Donnell). It trashes things, usually irreparably.

The American military, according to that point of view, is the problem. That’s how fucked-up the Democratic base is and has been ever since Vietnam. And my gloomy prediction is that the Dems will go down in 2008, and in every election thereafter, until they can show, rather than just say, that they support the troops.

Kudos to Ackerman (one exception to the under-30-know-nothings category) for trying, though.

p.s. on my queue: a bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Ackerman and Eli Lake.