Support This

Dennis Prager:

Liberals, Democrats and others on the Left frequently state that they "support the troops." For most of them, whether they realize it or not, this is not true. They feel they must say this because the majority of Americans would find any other position unacceptable. [SNIP]

In order to understand this, we need to first have a working definition of the term "support the troops." Presumably it means that one supports what the troops are doing and rooting for them to succeed. What else could "support the troops" mean? If you say, for example, that you support the Yankees or the Dodgers, we assume it means you want them to win.

But most of the Left does not want the troops to win in Iraq. The Left's message is this: "You troops may think you are winning; you may think you are doing good and moral things in Iraq; you may believe you are fighting the worst human beings of our age and protecting us against the scourge of Islamic terror. But we on the Left believe none of that. We believe this war is being fought for oil and for Halliburton and other corporations; we believe you are waging a war that is both illegal and immoral; we believe you have invaded a country for no good reason and have killed a hundred thousand Iraqis [the Left's generally mentioned number] for no good reason; but, hey, we sure do support you."

I think most people—those on either side of the political divide—realize the truth of Dennis Prager’s assertion. What's so infuriating about this is that such people think that their disguise is a good one; that the military or any of its real supporters buy the act. The left’s antipathy toward members of the Armed Forces is usually couched in condescension--as we have seen from some of my more left-leaning visitors and from challenged columnists like Reggie Rivers.

Actually, overt hostility is preferable, such as this:

So deep is leftist disdain for troops that most on the Left regard the mere presence of military personnel on a university campus as a form of contamination.

Such a situation is far more honest, noble(r), even. The only thing lower than openly despising your protectors is pretending that you “support” them and believing that they are too stupid to recognize the deception.

Outside of the comfy confines of the average college campus, however, the Left is having a tough time trying to Vietnamize the Iraq War and its protagonists, even with the gulag rhetoric from Amnesty International and Senator Richard Durbin. (The fact that either tried to float that epithet shows their contempt not only for the military, but for the American public at large; they did not expect so many Americans to know what the gulags were.)

It’s not 1971 and thanks be to God for that.