Your Voices Must Be Silenced

The current Senate continues to astound many Americans with their inability to act in their best interests. Fortunately, the latest attempt to reward illegal aliens with citizenship for breaking in to our country was stopped yesterday.

Consider it a very short-term victory.

Under the illusion of an oligarchy, the Senate expressed deep concerns over the impact the alternative media had in engaging the masses to respond directly to their representatives. Both parties vented in frustration over talk radio and how the curtains have been raised and politicians were caught with their pants down.

Trent Lott managed to stab an entire industry that once defended him:

"Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem."

Not long after, the Democrat Party leaders were quick to spout their own share of contempt for an informed citizenry.

Most notable was Ted Kennedy, who sunk shock value to a new low by comparing border agents and concerned citizens to the Gestapo.

"What are they going to do with the twelve and a half million who are undocumented here? Send them back? Send them back to countries around the world? More than $250 billion dollars, buses that would go from Los Angeles to New York and back again. Try and find them, develop a type of Gestapo here to seek out these people that are in the shadows. That's their alternative?"

Harry Reid made Trent Lott look like Mother Teresa:

"Talk radio has had a field day. These generators of simplicity. Now, Mr. President, I want everyone to know, I want the record spread. I do not believe that anyone who is a United States senator that votes against this motion to proceed is filled with prejudice, filled with hatred, with venom as we get in our phone calls and our mail. I don’t believe that."

In Reid's point of view, the American people are to blame, no matter what.

John Kerry has joined the chorus against the free exchange of ideas in exchange for dictatorship.

"I think the Fairness Doctrine ought to be there and I also think equal time doctrine ought to come back. I mean these are the people who wiped out one of the most profound changes in the balance of the media is when the conservatives got rid of the equal time requirements. And the result is that, you know, they’ve been able to squeeze down and squeeze out opinion of opposing views and I think it’s been an important transition in the imbalance of our public…"

I still give him credit - unlike Senator Voinovich, at least Kerry knows what the Fairness Doctrine is.

The war on free speech is next on the list, make no mistake. I predict a domino theory, should the Fairness Doctrine ever be reinstituted again. First, talk radio will lose interest because listeners desire to hear talking points, not a 24/7 debate. The Democrats know this. Then will come heavier regulation of the internet. Alternative media outlets, such as World Net Daily will be required to make room for a liberal point of view. If worse comes to worst, the blogosphere will be next on the list.

Forget about those border agents, let's replace them with people who can monitor talk radio!

A Better Vision For Iraq

There are those who believe in peace through strength. And there are those who seem to believe in peace through wishful thinking.

Given that vision is not necessarily a virtue, the Bush Doctrine tends to reside on the latter. Indeed, vision can be a scary thing. Many of the most successful presidencies were made so because they were not led by men who saught to leave behind a legacy. George H.W. Bush struck Saddam down when time made it right. His son, on the other hand, seemed to waste little time in drafting the case against the man who tried to kill his father.

After the plot had been arranged to take over the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, a confident President Bush made his way out to the United Nations in search for allies in his next phase in the "War on Terror." Bush charged Saddam for having violated sixteen United Nations Security Council Resolutions repeatedly. Oddly enough, the UN had no will to enforce their own resolutions. France and Russia were quick to reject the proposal to go to war, although their intelligence both suggested that Saddam was in pursuit of WMDs. Obviously, Saddam was quite brotherly as a trading partner to those nations.

In a 2003 interview with Newsweek, George Herbert Walker Bush discussed the seemingly enormous hassle of getting support from the French government, even during Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

MEACHAM: Do you regret that the president was unable to build the kind of international coalition you had in 1990-91?

BUSH: It’s a very different problem he faces, and my coalition-building was far easier because you could see the troops from Iraq in Kuwait. Even then, though, there was a lot of opposition. I was reminded by one of my top people the other day that the French were very difficult to get onboard.

What burns me up now are these statements that are critical of the president and of Colin Powell—"failed diplomacy." The problem they face is so different and so much bigger that I think any comparison is just night and day. It seems to be au courant, if you’ll excuse my knowledge of French, having studied it for 11 years, but I don’t agree with it. I think when history is written people are going to find some very interesting things about the French position. And I’m annoyed at the German position. I don’t talk about it publicly, but I know a lot of German people not in the coalition government with Schroder who are very, very upset about the position of their government.

MEACHAM: What do you think is going on with France?

BUSH: [Pause] They’re French.

MEACHAM: Any elaboration?

BUSH: Nope. There’s always been some friction. I was once talking to a group of French intellectuals, and I said, “You think we’re arrogant, and we think you’re French.” And they looked at each other and thought maybe I’d said something very intelligent. But that may well be it. It’s too bad, but life goes on, and we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.

In Bush's declaration of war, he was clear to market the intervention with the language of a compassionate crusader. Mistakes would soon follow: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted to carry on in his military buildup of expanding technology rather than reach a definitive strategy with a substantial amount of ground forces - a mistake that was foreshadowed by the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. All things considered, the US miltary and its allies were quick to topple an oppressive regime and achieved a series of early successes.

Then came the downfall of the Bush Doctrine.

Iraq somehow went from a potential terrorist threat to a democracy project, which created a time-consuming, bottomless pit expense. To this day, much of the developments in Iraq are being done by the military, when the Iraqis can take many tasks upon their own hands. In retrospect, the invasion would have been victorious in the long run if we had conducted a broad-scale search for illegal weapons, caught Saddam, and demanded that he pay financially in return for his failure to comply with the UNSCRs.

Needless to say, we might as well have declared victory in Iraq four years ago with these recommendations. We didn't have to make Saddam's Iranian problem our own problem. Instead, thousands upon thousands of needless civilian and military deaths came as a result of insurgent attacks - with credible evidence suggesting that the Iranians are behind many of them. A shorter stay would mean less deaths and better relationships with our allies.

Although we have brought life to a new democracy at an extremely high cost, there is still hope for more success in Iraq. Not all hope is lost.

Since the troop surge, sectarian violence and insurgent attacks have reportedly dropped on a dramatic scale. Patrick Ruffini of Townhall.com had a hopeful column two weeks since the surge began. Even though there have been successes in the Baghdad area, cynics warn of the consequences of spreading our military too thin, too late. Take for example, the fact that amputee soldiers are being sent for yet another tour of duty in Iraq.

As arrogant as the Democratic Congress has positioned itself, they managed to pass a $120 billion bill to fund the war without the danger of the timetable included.

After struggling for months to persuade Congress to issue a clean bill to fund the war, President Bush must use it wisely. The best option would be to bulk up on the surge for another 4-6 months and invest the remainder into Iraq's military, and lead our way out of Iraq from there.

A new and democratic government in Iraq may undergo many struggles on its own to win the peace, but the sooner we give them complete sovereignty of their own country, the sooner the Iraqis can prevail. Iraq can be a godsend as a trading partner to the free world, and more peace and national unity will come about as a result.