Bill Bennet gives the Democrats some excellent advice. One can’t help but think they won’t take any of it. Here are some excerpts.
As you continue your efforts to defeat President Bush, I hope you will not abandon your legacy nor President Clinton’s remorse. Today we are learning about the CIA’s failures to get the facts right about Iraq’s WMD program. But those failures do not belong to President Bush alone — and before you allow the various reports coming out to become your next platform of attack, take a moment and ask yourselves why former Kerry advisor Sandy Berger said the following in 1998: “He [Hussein] will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” Ask yourselves why Kerry adviser Madeleine Albright said the following at the same forum: “Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” Ask yourselves why President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that made it our foreign policy to change the regime in Iraq.
The liberation of Iraq was a positive good, with or without WMDs — a haven for terrorists is now a genesis of democracy; the mass graves where tens of thousands were buried are being emptied rather than filled; one of the worst human-rights violators in the world is now out of power — no longer able to torture, no longer able to invade neighbors, no longer able to threaten the world’s oil supply, no longer able to subsidize homicide bombers in Israel.
Bennet’s summing up:
Go back to your roots as you plan your speeches for Boston, as you prepare your campaign to replace President Bush. Re-embrace your concern for human rights abroad with your willingness to use force to defend those rights. Propose alternative foreign-policy strategies that can build off of our successes in Iraq and Afghanistan — and cease labeling those successes as failures. Restore the proper and respectful role of your partisan duties with legitimate differences of opinion that do not give doubts as to your principles. In the end, let ‘er rip, but do not — for the sake of your party, for the sake of your country — abuse your partisan role to further divide our nation, or our reputation abroad. Up until now, your demagoguery has put a primacy on the fanning of flames rather than the light a responsible use of heat should shed. Boston, the site of so much good from our country’s early history, can be the site of you reclaiming so much good from your party’s past. Now is the time for your new revolution; do not — in your heated passion — squander this moment.
Good advice….but it won’t be heeded.