Editorial Excerpts

Europe preens

"It has been quite the spectacle this week, with Condoleezza Rice touring Europe amid mock dismay over the fact that the CIA may have detained terrorists in European jails. If the secretary of state weren't so diplomatic, she'd cancel her tour and say she won't come back until the Continent's politicians decide to grow up," the Wall Street Journal said yesterday in an editorial.

"One of Europe's moral conceits is to fret constantly about the looming outbreak of fascism in America, even though it is on the Continent itself where the dictators seem to pop up every couple of decades. Then Europe dials 911, and Washington dutifully rides to the rescue. The last time was just a few years ago, as U.S. firepower stopped Slobodan Milosevic, who had bedeviled Europe for years," the newspaper said.

"In return, it would be nice if once in a while Europe decided to help America with its security problem, especially since Islamic terrorism is also Europe's security problem. But instead the U.S. secretary of state has to put up with lectures about the phony issue of 'secret' prisons housing terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans."


Embracing defeat

"The good news for the Democrats is that their leadership has settled on an electoral strategy for 2006. The bad news is that they have cribbed their game plan from one of the most disastrous campaigns in their history," Edward Morrissey writes at the Weekly Standard's Web site, www.weeklystandard.com.

"When was the last time that an entire political party stood for backpedaling the way the Democrats have in the past two weeks? Since Rep. John [P.] Murtha made his supposedly stunning announcement that he wanted an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, the Democrats have embraced surrender.

"Not even during the Vietnam War did a major American party position itself to support abject retreat as a wartime political platform. For that, one has to go back to the Civil War, when the Democrats demanded a negotiated peace with the Confederate States of America and a withdrawal from the South.

I'm not so sure about that. There were a heck of a lot of Democrasses doing their best Frenchmen impressions back in 1972.

"Celebrating the popularity of former General George McClellan, who had come from the battlefield to represent a party whose platform demanded a negotiated settlement (which McClellan later disavowed), the Confederates assumed that the war could be over within days of McClellan's presumed victory over the controversial and hated Abraham Lincoln. Even some Republicans began to question whether Lincoln should stand for re-election -- until Sherman took Atlanta and exposed McClellan as a defeatist and an incompetent of the first order.

"Murtha's demand for a pullout gave the party's leadership a chance to openly embrace defeatism, much as McClellan did for Northern Democrats in 1864, using McClellan's field experience for the credibility to argue that the American Army could not hope to defeat the enemy it faced."
(Thanks to The Washington Times for the heads up.)