In the “Seeing What …

In the “Seeing What You Want To See” Department, Jeff Fecke at “The Blog of the Moderate Left” took a shot at trying to distill my lefty blog reaction roundup of the Saddam capture into one sentence. Unfortunately, he failed miserably.

Shorter Considerettes

Because some anti-war folks aren’t unquestioningly happy about Saddam’s capture, they Hate America.

Excuse me just a second. Let me load up the web browser. OK, Ctrl-F, “hate”, Enter. Hmmm, no, I don’t see the word “hate” in my post. In fact, after actually reading it, I would have hoped my points were pretty plain. However, as my post noted, there are still loads of people like “Carrie B” who, on Howard Dean’s “Blog for America”, wept with sadness over the capture of Saddam Hussein (“I can’t believe this. I’m crying here. I feel that we now don’t have a chance in this election.”), and there are still folks like Mr. Fecke who try to hand-wave away any criticism by misrepresenting what was said. So as a public service to these folks, here are bullet points regarding what I actually said.

• If you can’t get excited at all about bringing a murderous dictator to justice (e.g. CalPundit), the obvious question is, “Why?” If you feel you must minimize the good news in order to get some (old, tired) digs in on a President you don’t like (e.g. daily Kos), same question. If you feel you must minimize the good news by trying to create some moral equivalence between the murderer and his captors (e.g. Atrios), same question. If you made it to the last paragraph, you’ll note that I believe the answer to that question is “politics”, which is ironic after you hear Democrats accuse Republicans of politicizing issues.
• If you didn’t do as much hand-wringing about the capture of Milosevic in a non-UN-sanctioned war, why are you doing so much of it when Hussein, arguably a much worse man, is captured? Answer: Politics.
• If you are trying to diminish the effect Hussein has had on the insurgency in Iraq by suggesting he’s been in that hole in the ground for 8 months (as a number of commenters did), why are you ignoring basic logic? Some said that since Hussein had no communication devices with him, he couldn’t have possibly been running the show. Well, he didn’t have a tape recorder either, yet tapes were (magically?) released that were confirmed to be his voice. Why would you try to minimize the Hussein capture by trying to minimize Hussein? Answer: Politics.

I do hope now that my point is clearer. For many on the left, good and evil are just points on the political spectrum. To them, these events can’t be good because a Republican is responsible for them. In the same situation, they had no such qualms when a Democrat did the deed. To them, everything is political, and like Mr. Fecke and Carrie B. they can’t see good and evil. They can only relate to events based on political affiliation, and thus they think, act, and create policy based on how it will affect themselves, not the country. It’s not that they hate America. It’s that they care far, far more for their own ideology than they do anything else; more than mass graves, more than UN programs that prop up murders, more than doing the right thing.

They don’t “hate America”, Mr. Fecke, but they are wrong for America. America is better than that.

UPDATE: …however, Orson Scott Card does say, “Some of my fellow Democrats are unpatriotic.”

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