Fortunately, All Is Well

IN THE MAIL: Col. Buzz Patterson’s War Crimes: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy Our Military and Lose the War on Terror.

I don’t think that the left wants to lose the war on terror, exactly — they just want Bush to lose the war on terror. I suspect, however, that Patterson’s theme is one that we’ll hear more in the future, especially if things go badly in Iraq [bold mine-DL]. ~Instapundit

Via Drum and Yglesias

Drum and Yglesias both noted the absurdity of the conditional phrase at the end of Reynolds’ post.  Something neither of them remarked on is the sheer gall of the book title that Reynolds lists here.  Note that he qualifies the second part of the subtitle, but not the first, which suggests that he has no strong disagreement with that part.  I would expect raving war supporters to believe that their critics want to “lose the war on terror” (except when, a la Romney, they want to accuse those critics of not even believing that it exists), but the idea that the people who are not in charge of the administration are on a campaign to “destroy our military” at the very time when the current administration is quite actively destroying our military with an open-ended, desultory military campaign is so contemptible and propagandistic that it surprises me that someone else has not already made this observation.  Perhaps progressives are so used to being browbeaten as anti-military that they no longer even bother to respond to such charges, or or perhaps they regard such things as beneath contempt and not worth answering, or perhaps they are themselves squeamish about trying to make arguments in which they play the role of superior supporters of the military.  In any case, if ever there was a charge that deserves some fierce pushback it would be this one.