Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics.com, Nov 4: “D” Stands for “Defeat”

As bad as things are now, a Democratic victory is likely to make things much, much worse very soon. The Democratic plan, if it is enacted, would deliver America into a period of retreat, humiliation, and uncertainty that we haven’t seen since the end of the Vietnam War–while giving our enemies a glorious victory that would be seen as a historical vindication of the Islamist cause.

And after such a victory, how long will it be before the Islamists decide that the time has come to strike an even harder blow against America, attacking us again on our own soil?

This is what is at stake next Tuesday.

Clifford D. May in the National Review, Nov 4: “If Democrats Win: How foreign policy might change.”

Now here’s my pessimistic scenario: The congressional Democrats who end up holding the reins are those favored by the left-wing base and blogs, such as Rep. John Murtha — who has said America is “more dangerous to world peace than Iran or North Korea,” and Rep. John Conyers, who has made it clear his agenda will include repealing vital counter-terrorism laws (e.g. the Patriot Act) and initiating impeachment proceedings against the president.

Among those inspiring such Democrats is Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.) a Yale professor who this week wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times explicitly calling for a policy of “cutting and running” from Iraq. The U.S. also should drop its “resistance to Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” Odom wrote. “This will be as distasteful for U.S. leaders as cutting and running, but it is no less essential.”

[..] Among the outcomes that need to be prevented: al Qaeda in Iraq setting up permanent bases in the Sunni regions of the west; Iran controlling the Shia regions of the south; Saddam Hussein released from his cell and restored to his palaces; the pro-American Kurds coming under attack by hostile neighbors; Militant Islamist terrorists using additional waves of suicide bombings of innocent civilians to drive Americans out of Afghanistan and also to take over Jordan, Bangladesh and other countries. Additionally, despite Odom’s strange delusions, it would be catastrophic if the Militant Islamist, terrorist-sponsoring, oil-rich, and feverishly anti-American regime in Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons.

Mark Steyn in the NY Sun, Nov 6: “My Face Time With Kerry”

Whatever he may or may not have intended (and “I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I’m the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it” must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses) what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America’s soldiers are only there because they’re too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That’s what they mean when they say “we support our troops” — they support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don’t support them as warriors and they don’t support the mission.

So their “support” is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that “of course” “we support our troops” isn’t support, it’s a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats’ frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair — a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: you get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the War on Terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry — a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly “reporting for duty” as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.