Save me daddy, save me
This is from the HuffPo and I need a laugh as I watch Meet the Press before the WorldCup
Seth Swirsky
06.09.2006
Why I Left the Left
I used to be a liberal. I was in one of the first "open" classrooms growing up in very progressive Great Neck, New York, in the 1960s. In 1971, when I was 11, I wrote vitriolic letters to President Nixon demanding an end to the Vietnam War. My first vote, in 1980, was for Independent John Anderson, followed by Mondale, Dukakis, and Clinton-Gore.
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In 1989, I remember questioning whether Democrat David Dinkins was the best choice for Mayor of New York City (where I lived) over Rudy Giuliani. After all, Dinkins' biggest claim to fame was as a city clerk in the Marriage License Bureau while Giuliani, as a United States District Attorney, had just de-fanged the mob. But, racial "healing" was the issue of the day, Dinkins won, and the city went straight downhill. When Giuliani beat Dinkins in a rematch four years later -- Surprise! -- the crime rate plummeted, tourism boomed, Times Square came alive not with pimps but with commerce. Since 1993, the overwhelmingly liberal electorate in New York City has voted for Republicans for Mayor. Yet, to this day, many of my liberal friends refer to the decisive and effective Giuliani as a Nazi, even as they stroll their children through neighborhoods he cleaned up.
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I was wrong. The Left got nuttier, more extreme, less contributory to the public debate, more obsessed with their nemesis Bush -- and it drove me further away. What Democrat could support Al Gore's '04 choice for President, Howard Dean, when Dean didn't dismiss the suggestion that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks? Or when the second most powerful Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, thought our behavior at the detention center in Guantanamo was equivalent to Bergen Belsen and the Soviet gulags? Or when Senator Kennedy equated the unfortunate but small incident at Abu Ghraib with Saddam's 40-year record of mass murder, rape rooms, and mass graves saying, "Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under new management, U.S. management"? What Democrat could not applaud the fact that President had, in fact, kept us safe for what's going on 5 years? What Democrat -- even those who opposed the decision to go into Iraq -- wouldn't applaud the fact that tens of millions of previously brutalized people had the hope of freedom before them?
What made me leave the Left for good and embrace the Right were their respective reactions to 9/11. While The New York Times doubted that we could succeed in Afghanistan because the Soviets in the '80s hadn't, George W. Bush went directly after the Taliban and Al Qaeda and crushed them in short order. Although many on the Left claim to have backed the President's actions, the self-doubt leading up to it, crystallized my view of the Left as weak and terminally lacking in confidence.
I supported President Bush's hard line against the father of modern terrorism, Yasir Arafat, remembering that Bush's predecessor hosted Arafat at the White House 13 times, more often than any other world leader. I applauded Bush's unequivocal support for Israel, which every day faced (and faces) suicide attacks against its people. But I was most disappointed with liberal Jews who don't understand that their very existence is rooted in Israel's existence and that George W. Bush has been the best friend that Israel has ever had. But because they are less Jewish than they are liberal, they didn't reward Bush with their vote in 2004.
Finally, I supported President Bush's decision to oust Saddam and make possible the only democracy (other than Israel) in this crucial region of the Middle East. Post 9/11, we had to figure out a way to lessen the chances of more 9/11s. Democracy is a weapon in that war. If people are free to build businesses, buy homes, send their children to schools, pursue upward mobility, live their lives without fear, read newspapers of every opinion, vote for their leaders, resolve differences with debate and not bombs, they will have no reason to want to harm us.
In response, the Left offered bumper-sticker-type arguments like, Bush lied and thousands died. But Bush never lied. He, like Clinton and Gore and Kerry and the U.N. and the British and French and Israeli intelligence services affirmed that Saddam's WMD were a vital threat -- a threat, that post- 9/11, could not stand. An overwhelming number of Democrats voted for the war -- but now the Left says they were "scared" into their votes by Bush. What does it say about Democrats if the "dummy" they think Bush is can scare them so easily?
Iraq is the "Normandy" of the War on Terror. The hope, once Iraq and Afghanistan are more stable, is that the nearly 70 million people in Iran will look at those countires (on it's left and right borders) and say: "Why do these people get to vote, send their women to school, and buy Nikes and we don't?" – and then topple their Mullah's dictatorial regime. The President understands the big picture -- that if the U.S. doesn't help to remake that volatile region, we will face a nuclear version of 9/11 within the next two or five or 10 years. He is simply being realistic in his outlook and responsible in his actions. Iraq is succeeding, slowly but surely, but that's not a sexy enough story to lead the news with: the relatively small amount of casualities are. Don't forget, we occupied Germany and Japan for seven years and we still have troops there, more than 60 years after World War II ended.
I can sum this up in a sentence: the world scared me and now I need a daddy to protect me.
Normandy? My God, people who were actually AT Omaha beach still have nightmares . They don't run around saying "Yeah, I watch a MG42 kill every friend I had" like a badge of courage. The ones that kept their sanity, don't bring it much because people don't drag up the worst days of their lives for entertainment of others.
Giuliani is regarded poorly because he was an unfair mayor. He treated blacks and Latinos as suspects and routinely bullied people to get his way."Cleaned up" is a euphemism for arrest blacks on any pretext. The most glaring example of his open racism was not the Diallo and Dorismond murders, but two little remembered incidents.
A young kid was coming home from midnight basketball, when a police officer shot him for no explainable reason. He wasn't doing anything and coming from an organized activity.
Sopranos star Robert Iler was arrested in a robbery in Carl Schurz park, a couple of blocks from Gracie Mansion, the city's mayoral residence.
Giulani attacked the innocent basketball player, who was black, and blamed his family for his walking while black.
Giuliani described Iler, who was charged with a felony, as a "good kid".
Now you have two teenagers, an innocent kid shot while walking, and an actor who was arrested for a felony and only one gets the lecture and the condemnation.
Which is why, Mr. Crawl in a corner and shit my pants, Giulaini is described as a "nazi".
His pathtetic idiocy about Iraq would be funny if I could just get the image of a three year old child crawling after his legless mother at Walter Reed's Ward 57
But what I find funniest in this is the obvious fact that Mr. Swirsky will not lift a finger to make any of this happen. He will sit in his LA home, pontificate on the greatness of Daddy Bush and how he's making the world safe from brown people like Giuliani did, but will take no personal responsibility for any of it.
The people bringing democracy to Iraq, such that it is, are State Department employees and the military. They aren't shitstained writers living in LA.
What angers me so much about these new right coverts is that it's all about them. Iraq is a charnel house, but as long as they have it safe at home, other people kids can die for it.
I bet no recruiter has darkened the Swirsky school or home, or their neighbors. I wonder what our shitstained coward would do, if someone offered a year in Iraq for his children or family.
He's talking about an occupation which he expected to be done by other people's kids at no cost to himself. He can construct his fantasy world of beating the Taliban, don't tell the Canadians that, because it's merely an essay on the HuffPo, not the reality of his 19 year old son
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