Ultraliberal columnist Katrina vanden Heuvel got a lot of lefties cheering on Sunday when she delivered a fairly predictable applause line on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous – telling Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol that if he really thinks the U.S. has a responsibility for Iraq’s security, he should enlist in the Iraqi army.
Here is the exchange:
This quickly became a frequently shared video clip on social media, as left-wing anti-war types declared that Kristol and others who strongly advocated the Iraq War a decade ago should be hounded out of all public debate and never again ascribed any credibility.
Now maybe you think Kristol and others who share his position were wrong. It’s not my point with this column to have that debate. But you can see in this part of a currently in-vogue tactic of the left to silence those whose positions they not only want to disprove, but essentially eliminate from acceptable discussion.
In the case of the Iraq War, the left thinks it has decisively and permanently won the argument that the war was a) a disaster; b) based on lies told by its advocates; and c) proof that the U.S. must never again take aggressive action abroad to battle a tyrannical foe. I don’t think they’ve won that argument at all, but they surely don’t care what I think. To them, it’s settled, and not only that, but everyone who strongly advocated the war deserves in their mind to be excommunicated from all public debate.
Bill Kristol was an outspoken advocate of the war, so as far as people like Katrina vanden Heuvel are concerned, he has no right to speak on the issue. This is the perfect opportunity for her to trot out the absurd-but-popular-with-liberals argument that anyone who favors a military engagement ought to join up. To take that argument to its logical conclusion, every war would be fought by every pro-war person in America, and all that would be left back home would be angry isolationists and peaceniks like Katrina vanden Heuvel!
But that doesn’t matter. The left believes it has so successfully marginalized Mr. Kristol that all they have to do at this point is insult him and hurl silly zingers at him.
They did the same thing the week before last when Dick Cheney published a column critical of Obama policy on Iraq. The left howled that Cheney should never be allowed to speak on the subject, which is typical of them and also ignores that his insight on the situation there today happened to be excellent.
And it’s not only Iraq. Some months ago, when Mozilla named Brendan Eich its CEO, gay activists drudged up campaign finance records showing that six years ago he contributed money to a California ballot initiative seeking to defend traditional one-man-one-woman marriage. For making this campaign contribution, which had nothing whatsoever to do with his job running Mozilla, he was forced to resign.
We see the same thing with people who are skeptical about liberal claims concerning global warming. They are labeled “deniers” (as if they are the equivalent of anti-Semites who deny that the Holocaust occurred) and bum-rushed out of universities and scientific enclaves.
All of this should tell you something about liberals and the way they view their own positions. If they really thought they could win debates on these issues, they would simply do so. When you seek to silence those who disagree with you, what that shows is that you feel threatened when their views are aired, and you feel the need to silence those opinions lest others hear them and be influenced by them.
The reason the left wants to silence Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol on the subject of Iraq is not because they were wrong 10 years ago and now don’t deserve to be allowed to speak. It’s because Obama’s abandonment of Iraq caused us to squander what had a chance to become a hard-earned victory there. They don’t want that point of view aired.
When people have such little confidence in their own arguments that they want to silence those who disagree with them, you should take their opinions with a huge grain of salt. And you should never elect them to anything.
