I saw General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees, on a day when the lefty outfit MoveOn.org informed us that they think Petraeus has cooties. It was childish beneath the dignity of adult Americans, much less a four-star general in the U.S. Army, a commander entrusted with the operation and care of our nation’s soldiers.

The general premise of the Democrats was that General Petraeus’s report – which mentioned past progress, future hope, and American optimism – had to have been edited by the Bush Administration. The general, they offered, was engaged in a political game at the end of George W. Bush’s strings.

The general and the ambassador are hopeful that the United States will be successful in this endeavor. Most Democrats offered the argument that if we leave now, the Iraqis, ready or not, will have to act to stop some Iraqis from killing other Iraqis and to stop al Qaeda from convincing some Iraqis to kill other Iraqis. The notion is insane, of course, but the Democrats do not believe this.

For the Democrats, this is about electoral gains. If Bush fails, they reason, they’ll pick up X Senate seats, Y House seats, and the Presidency. They are tacitly arguing that the United States will survive just fine if we are perceived as militarily weak. (Heck, diplomacy combined with an absence of a spine has served France well, right?) They are arguing that our military’s enthusiasm and moral will be fine if Congress pulls the plug and again forces them to lose a war. (After all, I suppose, it’s just politics.)

I had hoped that the Vietnam War’s protestors, the ones who lied about our troops and spat at them upon their return stateside had been so vilified by history and humanity that our nation and our nation’s soldiers would never again be put through this. Well, the press has made those shabby people retrograde trendy, servants of a “noble cause.” Too many today are driven toward a nostalgia for the unthinkable, and good causes are sacrificed in hopes of temporal political gain.

This strikes me as just so sad. They are attacking General Petraeus, putting a smiley face on bin Laden, and desecrating the Vietnam War memorial for reasons most of them do not understand. So many pawns trying to do so much damage.

But we hold it within our power to hold this madness at the level at which it currently exists: that of a very bad pseudo-documentary/training vid. Their warped version of reality, where adolescent political games are won if wars and lives are lost, is a bit too ugly to be allowed to become real. I trust humanity too much to believe that they would actually go through with this were it possible. It’s a game, and as long as it doesn’t mean aught more than some silly protests and babytalk threats, it can be tolerated.