Over on one of my other favorite blogs,
Emphasis Added, I was just
arguing with one of the regular conservative commenters on the subject of whether or not a Democratic president would have the nads to do what needed to be done to keep Americans safe. Out of that discussion, I came up with the following reasons why our next Democratic president will do a better job protecting us against anyone or any force that poses a real threat to America or Americans.
First of all, elected Republicans are bouyed by foreign terrorism. Indeed, according to a boatload of recent polls, the threat of foreign terrorists is the only remaining thing that Republicans have working for them with the American electorate. They need that threat to remain viable in order to perpetuate their wartime scenario wherein neither the Constitution nor common sense apply any longer, and they can continue to avoid accountability for their many moral and practical failures.
Second, the Republicans have spent the last 5 years telling the American people that Democrats are weak -- that voting for a Democratic candidate endangers Americans. You can be damn sure that our next Democratic president will be aware of that political reality, and will take any and all actions available to prevent any credible threats (y'know, like "Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside United States").
Furthermore, as the Newt Gingrich strain of anti-government ideology has metastisized in the Republican party in the last dozen or so years, the Republicans have entirely lost the ability to run any government functions competently or without corruption. If your core ideological belief is that government is by definition corrupt, incompetent and tyranical, then when you are put in charge of that government, you (apparently) run that government in a corrupt, incompetent and tyranical manner. As an example of how this manifests itself in national security, look at the distribution of funds to harden potential terrorist targets, with loads of "targets" being identified in rural Indiana, and none identified in NYC! To the Republicans, governement (even in terms of national security) is nothing but pork. Democrats understand that government is a necessary institution that can and should be used to accomplish good things. Sure there will always be some corruption (this is politics, after all) but to Democrats, corruption is not the entire point of government, as it seems to be for today's Republicans. With a Democratic president, we can expect an approach to terrorism and other foreign threats that is (warning, talking point ahead) both tough and smart, instead of being tough, but also corrupt and profoundly unwise.
Will our next Democratic president attack every target that America's Dumbest Criminals would? Of course not, thank God. And I'm sure that the neo-con dead-enders will insist then that there are a million nameless bin Ladens out there whom the Democratic president should be taking out, and the failure to do so is more evidence that Democrats endanger the American people. That will be exactly as true as their arguments in the lead up to the Iraq war.
By the same token, any diplomatic or military successes that our next Democratic president has will be belittled and derided as distractions from the "real" work of improving our security, which consists, apparently, of the conquest of Iraq, Syria and Iran (but not, apparently, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan -- or getting bin Laden for that matter). And it will be the same bullshit that was slung at Clinton when he took action against bin Laden and al Qaeda as he was being prosecuted by the hysterical Republicans for having an affair.
Finally, on that last note, I'd like to refer everyone here to a rather extensive cataloging of Clinton's efforts against bin Laden and al Qaeda, and Republicans' resistance to them. The relevant section begins with Starting in 1995, Clinton took actions against terrorism that were unprecedented in American history and continues with examples for about a dozen paragraphs. I offer this link as evidence to counter the straw-man argument that modern Democrats do not have the balls to protect Americans, but Republicans do.