Support the Troops

That Kerry thing just won’t go away. While the Left is doing its absolute best to ignore the flap and dismiss it as “just a blooper,” much ado about nothing, or— if they acknowledge it at all— just more heated rhetoric from the Republican Attack Machine. Pundits on the Right, on the other hand, have moved beyond Kerry himself and are delving into The Deeper Meaning. And I keep reading what they have to say.

I read two such articles yesterday that have the ring of truth. One comes from Mark Steyn, one of my usual Sunday reads. The other is by a guy I’ve never heard of, Dennis Keohane, writing in American Thinker (via Real Clear Politics). Both guys write about the same thing, make essentially the same points, but do so in different ways. Keohane goes a little deeper than Steyn, but both are right on target. First Mr. Steyn:

Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops." They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission.

So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world.

Now Mr. Keohane:

There is a clash of cultures at work in this, between the historic Democratic culture of ‘caring’, and those who value the ‘warrior culture’ of our military. Both sides care, but express that care with very different methods.

One can hardly find a Democrat anywhere who, when addressing the topic of support for our troops, does not immediately go to the subject of Veteran’s medical benefits, followed shortly by education and retraining programs. When it comes to addressing actual combat, the Democrats again almost invariably go to a lack of body armor or a shortage of up-armored Humvees and the like. The better of the Democratic left (and they are better than the condescending-to-hostile left from Kerry to numerous KosKids) look at the military and the veterans the military produces as another demographic constituency.

Like any other needy Democrat constituency, military and veterans need their help and care, naturally delivered through the offices of a paternalistic government. The warrior culture of the military rightfully views itself as the protector and defender of citizens, politicians and the state itself. The enormous gap between those two conceptions offers a profound clash of cultures.

Steyn makes a damned good point, and one that’s familiar to anyone who reads milblogs, even casually. The troops, in their wisdom, reject the “we support our troops but not the war” meme. Mike Fay, for one, is very vocal about this subject on his blog, pointedly telling Lefties dropping those sorts of comments on his blog to just STFU, albeit more politely. Lefties, for the most part, just don’t get it when they offer their support and it is rejected. Confusion, hurt, and all the other emotions associated with rejection come to the fore. And Mr. Keohane attributes that to “culture clash.” I believe Keohane is correct.

I only have anecdotal evidence concerning the accuracy of Mr. Keohane’s theory, but it’s pretty damned strong. Roughly half of my friends, interestingly enough, are Liberals. And half of my Lefty friends refuse to discuss politics with me—we’ve agreed to disagree, and I’m OK with that. They aren’t my friends because of their politics, anyway. Of the ones that do discuss politics with me, every single one of them are against the war but “support the troops.” And not a single one understands why this is a contradiction. Mr. Keohane again:

Even if the better Democrats understand that victory is a priority, that priority will always be in competition with another: caring. The shooting will no sooner start than they will want to get the troops out of there, because they care! They don’t want to see anyone suffer!

Yet the warrior culture, when that shooting starts, sees the priority clearly and simply as: we fight to win.

[…]

The better Democrats cannot shake the idea that any time we have taken casualties, it is somehow a military failure. Bill Clinton’s Kosovo Campaign is celebrated in the media as a victory primarilly because the ‘high altitude only’ bombing gave us zero casualties.

That the better Democrats have this attitude should be worrisome. Any Democratic administration will become incapable of fighting any war to victory if the harder left is only confronted by those who just think it is a failure to have to fight, and no casualties should be taken.

The troops want the nation to support their commitment to victory. They do not aspire to the status of needy client, they want to be victorious warriors and commit their very lives to it.

My friends are “better Democrats,” and they DO care. But they don’t get it. We’re in a war, and we’re fighting that war to win. Period. Support the troops, support the mission. It’s that simple.

And then there are the “not so good Democrats,” those that reject the very idea that we’re engaged in a global war. These folks acknowledge the reality of war in Iraq, but they want to put an end to that war, immediately, if not sooner. That war is wrong, it was started on false pretenses, it’s Dubya’s personal vendetta, it’s all about oil, yadda, yadda, yadda. Anything but the frickin’ truth. And here is where Mr. Steyn and Mr. Keohane end up, singing in perfect harmony. Mr. Steyn:

To be sure, like Kerry in 2004 deciding that the murderers and rapists were now his brave "band of brothers," the left often discover a sudden enthusiasm for the previous war once a new one's come along. Since Iraq, they've been all in favor of Afghanistan, though back in the fall of 2001 they were convinced it was a quagmire, graveyard of empire, unwinnable, another Vietnam, etc. Oh, and they also discovered a belated enthusiasm for the first President Bush's shrewd conduct of the 1991 Gulf War, though at the time Kerry and most other Democrats voted against that one, too. In this tedious shell game, no matter how frantically the left shuffles the cups, you never find the one shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When it Matters.

Mr. Keohane:

All of this points out why the Kerry kerfluffle may have a bigger impact Tuesday than many realize. Since the Foley imbroglio, the speculation has been that some or even much of the ‘Christian right’ of the Republican base, evangelicals and conservative Catholics, may sit it out in disgust, seeing a betrayal of their moral values by Republicans.

But as demographic groups, these two have had a significantly higher rate of membership in the military than the public at large. They honor their warriors as warriors, not as victims or charity cases, understanding that we have our freedoms because hard men and women are and have been willing to do hard things for our freedom’s sake.

Kerry’s reminder of how their family members in the military may fare under the Democrats will be powerful in an election that is now said to be a battle of turnout.

Bottom line? The prevailing mindset of the Democrat party renders them unfit to govern in war time. They simply aren’t mentally equipped to do so. We don’t need a “caring” government, we need a government that is willing and able to kill terrorists, where ever they are. That ain't the Democrats.