TAKE ANOTHER STAB AT IT

Sometimes, especially lately, my motivation to write has worked in inverse relationship to the possibility that I'll be able to persuade anyone that I'm right about anything. After catching a few minutes of Colin Powell's thorough presentation to the UNSC today, and then hearing bits of reaction from around the country tonight, I'm all but convinced that it's just impossible to convince people of things when they're really not interested in the facts. I watched all of 5 minutes of Powell's speech, and found what I saw confirmed what I've long believed, but then caught a snippet of Donahue (don't ask me why I'd waste my time with him, but I did for a little while), and then caught some Democrat congressman from Oregon on O'Reilly, and saw some of the sloppiset argumentation and weakest critical thinking. Donahue's eyes would pop out at the mere hint that war might be necessary. He had this woman on from some Institute for Obscuring Truth and Coddling Dictators or whatever outfit, and she kept insisting that between Colin Powell and Saddam Hussein, she just didn't know whom to believe. US Secretary of State, representing the world's healthiest democracy, or the mad murderous ruler of beleaguered backwater. Tough call. So she wants more committees to convene, let all the nations of the world verify Powell's photos and videos and telephone intercepts independently, before we can even seriously consider taking on Saddam. On her timetable, we'd still be weighing the merits of dumping a few bags of tea into Boston Harbor.

But I just can't make myself gin up the needed passion to fight these people anymore. Their arguments are pathetic and self-refuting. It's sad that a man smart enough to get himself elected to Congress can't see the difference between a nuclear-armed state and a state with nuclear ambitions, and that that critical difference just might lead to dissimilar strategies when approaching them. Truth is, I do think he was smart enough, but that he just doesn't have the intellecctual honesty to fess up that he's just plain old anti-war in all circumstances, and that at the end of the day he likely thinks George W. Bush is as big a problem as Saddam Hussein. I wish I were just being paranoid, but when Democrats.com approvingly quotes Saddam's response to Powell's UN speech, the game is over. America's hard left is only American by accident of birth. Its ideology is from some other place and some other time. Say, Moscow, 1917.

For the here and now, I'm just tired of having to refute every lie that's thrown my way (how many different ways can I prove Republicanism doesn't equal racism, and how much time am I willing to spend doing it when I know that the lies won't stop because the liars love them too much? How many different ways can I prove that should war come it isn't about empire or oil or any of that nonsense--it's about removing a clear and present danger to the United States.). For serious people, the question of whether war is necessary or not is the question of the moment, and while reasonable minds can still disagree I think the anti-war side is finding itself grasping a thinning reed. At the end of it, if the anti-war crowd gets its way it will end up killing the UN, one of its favorite mechanisms for pushing socialistic schemes and restraining American influence on the world. So for them, it's a loss either way--go to war, and they're refuted in the short term. Don't go to war, and the whole concept of international law goes down the toilet. For the pro-war side, irrefutable vindication may never come. Sure, we'll clobber Iraq's ragged army and replace Saddam, thereby ending the threat he poses, but then Saddam and his terrorist allies will never obliterate an American city, and the anti-war crowd will always be able to insist that he never would have. So we'll be left to keep on having the same arguments about the same things like some perpetual national version of Crossfire, just yelling back and forth and never seeing eye to eye.

Red and blue America. Red has the upper hand right now, which is a good thing, but I fear that much of blue America will always find red America only slightly less scary than dictators with big bombs. And a smaller part of blue America will always find red America the scariest place on earth.