Rudy gets it!

Every once in a great while we encounter politicians who grasp not only the governing and decisive issue of the times but the possess the ability to define it, focus on it and persuade people to change their minds about it. We call that behavior leadership.

The Democrat MoveOn.org New York Times ad attacking General David Petraeus, near unanimously confirmed by the Senate only months ago, and the echo chamber in the Democrat Congressional Caucuses provides what drunks call a moment of clarity for our society. America is presented with the true face of the modern American liberal and her addiction to despair and defeat.

Hillary Clinton’s employment of the Coleridge idiom-“willing suspension of disbelief” for fiction to describe General Petraeus’ optimistic report on Iraq provides crystalline clarity to so much of what is wrong and dangerous about the American self-loathing left. Rather than confront the reality that, despite the American left’s own best efforts to conform American policy to Iranian and Jihadi objectives, the United States and our allies both must and are prevailing in the Iraqi theater, the American left attacks the messengers of good news, like Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.

It is frustrating that the lefties cannot answer factual, historical and contextual arguments with anything deeper than a tag line like “there must be a political solution” or a recitation of the latest body count. Now, as factual reality again intrudes unpleasant success in the Democrats’ ceaseless veil of despair they resort to the disgraceful attack on the heroes in the field, abandoning even the disingenuous “we support the troops” slogan of the past six years in a pall mall race back to the hate filled days of the Vietnam War.

Most Americans do not share the left’s nostalgia for Vietnam. Most Americans understand the lasting damage that flight from Vietnam did to their nation, you know, the United States. Most Americans now understand how truly the American left and their media fronts like Walter Cronkite distorted the conditions on the ground to create the impression of defeat from the reality of victory in Vietnam. It’s our Republican duty to ensure comprehesive public appreciation of the national need and ability to win in Iraq.

Simply put, most Americans want to win. For whatever reason, the Administration has done a poor job of staying on top of the story. I think the President thought that his reelection meant an end to politics. The President has ignored the relentless erosion of public support for the Iraqi theater by the left’s distortion of the context and reality in Iraq. Worst of all, for far, far too long Republicans have been intimidated by the Democrats’ increasingly ugly and irrational pursuit of domestic political victory at the cost of devastating national defeat. Most Republicans have forgotten that leadership tells people what they don’t necessarily want to hear and persuades them to do what they don’t necessarily want to do.

Rudy gets it, however, and he has fired back. The new Giuliani web ad is great, smacking the leftist icon Evita with a direct attack on the content and context of the mainstream liberal endorsement of this deceptive, radical and self-loathing isolationism.

Best of all, Evita’s response is a grotesque of leadership. Her reply is merely a statement that the unpopularity of the war justifies deception, distortion and defamation to gratify a popular but self-destructive public desire for flight from the ceaselessly televised, ugly carnage of war. Such thinking bespeaks the feckless leadership of the Carter and Clinton Administrations that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Usama bin Laden now cite as proof of the Jihads’s inevitable victory and the United States’ inevitable retreat from the Middle East. Such a result would leave Israel in the genocidal clutches of the Islamofascist jihad and the Western economies in a depression that makes the 30’s look like the 80s.

But then again, Rudy does know something about confronting a wise guy.