Tom DeLay savages the Dems

I've never really formed an opinion of Tom DeLay, but I seriously like what he says in this column. I tried picking a few choice paragraphs to quote here, but there's just too much good stuff, so here it is in its entirety.

Other than seeing overweight relatives over the holidays, there's never a bad time to be honest. If a member of Congress sincerely regrets a decision or a speech or a vote, whether about authorizing the president to use force in Iraq or anything else, the member should feel free to say so.

This is the calculus many Democrats would have us believe they used to come to their current hand-wringing lamentations over their votes on the war. This is all well and good, both morally and politically, except for one thing: Everyone knows it's nonsense.

The Democrat Party was neither consumed with conviction that we should remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq in 2003, nor was it duped into authorizing the use of force by the Bush administration. Instead, Democrats were generally content with the policy of their last president, Bill Clinton, whose approach to Iraq and every other Middle Eastern threat was to threaten much and do little.

The insincere gesture has been elevated by the Clinton Democrat Party to an art form: apologizing for slavery but opposing reparations; apologizing for tax hikes but opposing tax cuts; condemning a terror attack without doing anything to stop the next one; lamenting global warming but not doing anything about it. The Iraq war authorization was no different.

When the Iraq resolution passed in October 2002, the country supported the war. Democrats then worried that supporting President Bush would make the crackpots at MoveOn.org mad, thus hurting them come election time. But at the same time, they worried that opposing Bush would make middle America mad, thus hurting them at election time. As usual, it was all about them, and they wanted it both ways. It's always politics with them.

They wanted to position themselves to take credit when and if the war went swimmingly, while at the same time being able to criticize the president if things went badly. They didn't vote for the war (or the USA Patriot Act, for that matter) because they believed in it, but because it was popular and they wanted people to like them. Their position hasn't changed in four years. The same craven logic explains the treacherous idiocy behind their nonbinding war resolution. Now that the war is unpopular, they want to distance themselves from the mission and stick it in Bush's face.

But in a million years Democrats wouldn't have the guts to cut off funding for the mission. On the chance that Gen. David Petraeus's surge works, they want to be able to take the credit for it. In that party, guts have been replaced with calculation.

Many conservatives believe that deep down, liberals are just pacifists, that what they really want to do is cut and run. I don't believe that. I think deep down what liberals want is for war to be easy and bloodless and that they get the credit for winning while Republicans get the blame for losing. If that doesn't sound like a serious national security policy in a time of war, there's a reason for that: The Democrats don't have a serious national security policy and haven't since Vietnam.

So go ahead and apologize, if you're really sorry, but the question begs: Sorry for what? For liberating 25 million people? For removing a tyrannical psychopath from the world stage? For ending a verified weapons of mass destruction program? For fighting the war against terror? Or are you really just sorry that you're saddled with the consequences of an insincere vote in the first place?

With such men and women leading Congress, the United States would have surrendered the Revolutionary War after New York, the Civil War after Bull Run, World War II after Kasserine Pass and the Cold War after Vietnam (come to think of it, that's exactly what they did propose).

Now there's something to apologize for. And yes, I am questioning their patriotism.

Hat Tip: Hot Air