Monday Must Read

Norman Podhoretz has written another doozy of an article covering more of what the MSM is not telling you about the GWOT and the battle for Iraq. Iraq is not a war, it is a specific battle in WW IV and one we must at all cost win just as the Battle of the Bulge was a must win and Iwo Jima. It is long but it is a must read, courtesy of the OPJ.

A couple of quotes.

"Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country
has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found
my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at
an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times.
They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in
which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that
they "shrink from the service of [their] country."
But Paine did not limit
his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence
whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the
battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let
loose on another group:
'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will
sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have
their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the
touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which
might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.Thus, he explained, "Many a
disguised Tory has lately shown his head," emboldened by the circumstances of
the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had
previously seemed prudent to conceal"

"Tom Paine grew so disgusted with "the mean principles that
are held by the Tories," with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with
the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of
1776-77 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender
in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless
arguments to show them
their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world
to either their folly or
their baseness.And so, "quitting this class of men
. . . who see not
the full extent of the evil that threatens
them,"

Paine turned

"to those who
have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter
out,"

and rested
his hopes on them.
These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not
disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see "the
full extent of the evil that threatens" us; who understand the necessity of the
war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral,
political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight
this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose
birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve
in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so
crucial a part."

He decisively dismembers the defeatocrat's lucubrations and retorical hubris with readily available facts if you take the effort to find them, the MSM won't tell you as they have a vested interest in losing since they predicted failure and it is completely the opposite despite their efforts.