Supporting the Troops

Daniel Henninger asks "Is America losing the will to fight [the war on terrorism]?"

It may be. The media are like wind and water. Public opinion might withstand the big blows, but it's the steady drip, drip, drip that does the major damage, hidden from view until it's too late, and we wake up thinking that all we need to stop it is to close Guantanamo, pull out of Iraq, and become isolationists. Henninger addresses this conclusion:

If we removed our troops from Iraq, the terror would not stop. But the U.S. news of innocent civilians blown up in Iraq would move to the unread round-up columns. Then, in a way, the phenomenon of terror would indeed shrink--to this:

"December 2004: A powerful explosion ripped through a market packed with Christmas shoppers in the southern Philippines yesterday, killing at least 15 people and injuring 58."

According to the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (established after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), there have been about 8,300 terrorist bombings in the world the past 10 years. They have killed more than 10,000 human beings and injured--often appallingly, one assumes--some 43,000 people. (There are separate tallies for arson, kidnapping, hijacking, etc. September 11 is listed as an "unconventional attack.")

Fortunately we still have men and women who see clearly what is at stake and what is needed, like Bill Whittle:

This is the poison that will eventually kill us all. I should spend an hour a day prostrate and thanking God I was born an American. How many struggle and die for this privilege?

But there is hope for us. We can change. I can change, and I am as stubborn a cuss as they come. And there is hope here, on these pages. Not my pages -- I’m but a speck of flotsam in an electronic ocean. But these pages, these ghostly pages pulled from the ether down highways of colored light. These pages may be able to save us.

Because now, for the first time in human history, a small person can talk to millions. The defeatism and cynicism of our betters is no longer the only voice we hear. Now, for the first time, we common people, we citizens, can speak directly to each other about life within the Sanctuary, and those unseen people, those builders and maintainers of decency and civilization have at their command a tool with which to make their voices heard. We can patrol and repair these crumbling walls from within and man the gates ourselves.

There are millions of us. Millions. And we do not have to go gently into that good night.

If you needed a reason to start a blog or post a comment on one, you have one now.

I salute the men and women who serve this country, who look terrorism in the eye and don't flinch or make excuses for it. I love them like my own children. I pray for them. Those who, like Dick Durbin, care more about the human rights of terrorists than those of the innocents they blow up on a daily basis don't deserve to be defended by such heroes. He is vermin.

This is another of those times in our history that try mens' souls. Our media and many of our leaders are failing the test. The left has no loyalty left. They loudly denounce anyone who impugns their patriotism, but it only calls more attention to their words and actions, and when one examines these, one must conclude that such criticisms are true.

I hope somewhere someone is compiling an archive of Durbin's anti-American rants and that they come back to haunt him in due course. For a senator to so reflexively accept the worst slurs against our troops is beneath contempt. He needs to resign. If I were a Senate Democrat I'd want him removed from my leadership and censured, but then, I'll never sink to being a Senate Democrat.

Update: Austin Bay is concerned about this fading of support too. He criticizes the Administration for not making its case more forcefully. As I hear it, Bush is scheduled to start doing so, but when the MSM won't cover his speeches or does so with clips that weaken his message, it's an uphill climb. Once again, why isn't Rupert Murdoch putting a half-hour news show edited down from Brit Hume's program on the Fox broadcast network? The time this would take from local stations might hurt at first, but I think that Brit could knock the other three network news shows out of the running pretty quickly, and more than make up revenues lost. The Utah Fox affiliate has its local news on at 9:00 p.m. so it must figure that news isn't a bad investment. If they had Hume's program on just before their primetime lineup, they might be pleasantly surprised.