The Muslim Question 2

Posted with author’s permission

By Joan Swirsky

Ever since President Bush was (1) elected in 2000, and (2) decided to (gasp!) fight back against the Islamic fanatics who attacked our country on September 11, 2001, the entire world – it appears – has waged non-stop protests against our Commander in Chief. Day after week after month after year, the leftist worldwide media, led by our own, have issued scathing commentary as well as graphic footage of anti-Bush and anti-American demonstrations.

But something funny happened on the way to the left’s goal of relegating the president and his policies to eternal ignominy. In spite of the multimillion words and zillions of dollars they’ve spent on their hysterical campaigns, they have utterly failed!

Elections Don’t Lie
Around the world, untold millions of people have chosen – through their ballot boxes – not socialism or multiculturalism but democracy, the rule of law, free markets, and freedom from Islamic fanatics. While many new democracies are in their infancy, they’re democracies nonetheless, embraced by those willing to risk their lives for the freedom and privileges that democracy confers.

▪ Iraq: Three free elections affirming the president’s vision for a democratic Middle East, and a military surge that is already showing signs of progress.

▪ Israel: A weak Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, soon to be replaced by a diehard conservative, Benjamin Netanyahu, who, like Bush, believes that there is no substitute for victory in the War on Terrorism.

▪ Australia: Prime Minister John Howard, a stalwart supporter of the president, has been handily reelected, not once but four times.

▪ England. Prime Minister Tony Blair, another ardent supporter of Bush, will soon be replaced by conservative Gordon Brown, who while besieged by pacifists as well as Muslims remains devoted to the traditional alliance with America.

▪ France: Nicolas Sarkozy, another admirer of our president and his policies, recently defeated the socialist Ségolène Royal, and promised to align himself and his country along the lines of American conservatism.

▪ Germany: The center-right Chancellor, Angela Merkel, another Bush admirer, defeated the hostile-to-America Gerhard Schröder.

▪ Colombia: Alvaro Uribe, president of Colombia, is another admirer of George Bush’s policies and vision.

▪ Turkey: Recently, more than a million secular Turks demonstrated in the Aegean port city of Izmir against the Islamic-rooted government.

▪ Ukraine: In 2004-2005, millions of people joined the Orange Revolution to rally for democracy, yet another testimony to the contagion of democracy that President Bush has consistently propounded.

▪ In 2007, Kuwaiti women cast votes for the first time, less than a year after winning full political rights (under Sharia law) in the oil-rich Gulf state – no thanks to American feminists who have been too busy bashing President Bush to notice anything awry in the Muslim world.

▪ According to Freedom House, an American organization that tracks global trends in political freedom, at the end of 2005 there were 122 electoral democracies (64 percent of the world’s states, compared with 40 percent in the mid-1980s). Further, 89 of these were rated as politically free – 46 percent of all states, compared with only 25 percent in 1975.

The Midterm Elections
But didn’t the Democrats take control of Congress, and doesn’t that “prove” that our country repudiated the policies of President Bush? Well, yes they did, but no it doesn’t!

The midterms were a testimony to Democracy in action, when the all-too-few people who actually vote registered their dissatisfaction, not with the Iraq War or defeating the terrorists who daily threaten America and its allies with annihilation, but rather with the seemingly sluggish progress of the war.

Democrats promised to “support our troops” and provide more effective domestic and foreign policies. Instead, according to the Congressional Quarterly, about half the laws the 110th Congress has passed have “changed the name of a federal building, post office or national recreation area.”

Journalist and author Emmett Tyrrell goes further in describing the stunning ineffectualness of our newly elected majority: “When Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi led their enlightened hordes onto Capitol Hill early this year, they promised liberation and progress. They would raise the minimum wage. Homeland security was to be made foolproof. Medicare’s drug prices would be lowered by congressional writ. They had a scheme to lower interest rates on college loans. Finally something vast and ingenious was going to be done about the war in Iraq. Possibly the congressional Democrats were going to yank our military from that inhospitable country and replace it with the Peace Corps or perhaps the Good Humor Man. Of course, the fulminating Democrats have accomplished none of the above.”

And according to Investors’ Business Weekly, “For all the promises of its new Democratic leaders, Congress seems truly interested in doing only one thing: surrendering in Iraq. No wonder its public approval ratings have sunk below the president’s.”

Those approval ratings, according to a Gallup poll, declined from 37 percent to 33 percent in mid-April and to 29 percent in mid-May, no doubt fueled by Pelosi’s ill-conceived trip to Syria, where she unctuously bowed and scraped before its terrorist president, Assad, and of course Reid’s gift to Osama bin Laden and our other enemies with his declaration that “This war is lost.” And that is not to omit the demand of Reid and Pelosi, along with other liberals, that we tell our enemies the exact date we plan to surrender.

Note To Liberals: Keep On Truckin’!
I, for one, am delighted by the degree to which the bright sunshine of media exposure has revealed what Democrats (read liberals) are really all about.

While engaging in pointless hearings that waste precious time and cost millions, and while bringing dozens of boondoggling amendments to our war-funding bill, Democrats are proving to the country that their real goals are nothing more base than to defeat the man who defeated them twice for the presidency and to lose the war in Iraq.

So far, we have learned that the three leading contenders for the presidency – Clinton, Obama, and Edwards – are all far-left and anti-war (Clinton the only one to have done a 180-degree flip-flop on the issue).

They have told us – in unmistakably plain English – that they intend to levy the largest tax increase in American history and institutionalize socialized medicine, and that they refuse to support any energy saving strategies that involve domestic drilling, the building of new refineries, and the use of nuclear power.

Other of their lofty goals include embracing galloping socialism, quashing if not the practice than the ethos of Christianity, placing our military and intelligence systems on life support (as they did under Bill Clinton), opening the floodgates for upwards of 50 million illegal aliens, and fostering close alliances with Communists and terrorists like Castro, Chavez, Assad, Ahmadinejab, et al.

This is because, Tyrell posits, “Defeatism is…now part of the Democratic Party’s DNA…[it has come to be] called the Democrats’ Vietnam Syndrome. It is why for years the Democrats have not been trusted on matters of national security.”

It is apparent that much of the rest of the world agrees, and that the conservative military and defense policies of President Bush, as well as his compassionately conservative domestic policies, have caught on “big time.”

You won’t see newspaper headlines or TV reportage about this phenomenon because the liberals among us – including our leftwing media – have still not recovered from what syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, has called the Bush Derangement Syndrome they acquired seven years ago.

But if you think you’ve seen liberal pathology since 2000, watch out for 2008 when even more countries elect conservative leaders and one of our own liberal candidates – waffling Hillary, pretty-boy John, and bromide-afflicted Barack – goes down to defeat. src

Joan Swirsky is a New York-based author and journalist who has been a longtime health-and-science and feature writer for The New York Times Long Island section. She is the recipient of seven Long Island Press Awards…