It seems that the Democrats have had it and want to withdraw from Iraq. I can’t really understand why they have had it while the men who are actually fighting there seem content to carry on. The Democrats have fears that the actual front line soldiers don’t share. They are so cowardly that they catch influenza of other people’s supposed fears. When they are not even in the battlefield, they sneeze into white handkerchiefs of surrender.
Democrats feel this makes them humanitarians—that is, sympathizing with the dangers of soldiers who are not even afraid. Sometimes I feel that Democrats have taken out a shovel and scooped up all the fear in the world and poured it onto their own heads. Then they want to take credit for their concern for the veterans. But the veterans don’t want their wimpy concern. They want to continue being the men they are and doing the job they do so well. They don’t want the soil on the shovel of Democrat’s nervous sympathy to be poured on their heads like at a grave site. They don’t want to be buried in the bathetic remorse of scattered, meretricious sympathies. They want to be spared the false sympathy of strangers.
They do not want Obama to make speeches over them. If he just doesn’t get it, he shouldn’t spread his misunderstanding of courage around. He should attend a poetry class at Columbia or a lecture on communism at Cooper Union.
David Lawrence
