Doug Ross @ Journal

Jane Fonda, the Bus Tour and the Terrorists

Picture credit: http://www.swapsale.com
The insufferable Jane Fonda will embark on a vegetable-powered bus tour to protest the Iraq war. Not satisfied with one egregious, anti-military, and anti-American effort in her lifetime, she's decided to double up.

Pete DuPont, the former Governor of Delaware, writing in the Wall Street Journal, tells Jane what time it is:

Without the United States, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq would be terrorist-controlled nations... ...Like Old Europe, liberal America is bothered by principled international positions. "The Right Nation," by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, points out that liberals were "nervous about moral absolutes, preferring to see the world in shades of grey. After Sept. 11, liberal academics looked for reasons to explain al Qaeda: Was it the product of racism? Of economic injustice? Of American policies in the Middle East?" In his presidential campaign Howard Dean, now national Democratic Party chairman, said our "pre-emptive war is wrong for America"; and liberal leader Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that "the U.S. presence [in Iraq] is part of the problem, not part of the solution."

Like Neville Chamberlain and countless appeasers before him, Fonda and the rest of the surrender crew prefer to bury their heads in the sand and hope that signalling weakness will dissipate the threat of terrorism. One only needs to read the history books to predict, with certainty, that such a strategy is doomed to failure.

After all, we've tried it before, haven't we?

Imagine that Sheik Abdul Rahman, the spiritual leader of those convicted of blowing up the World Trade Center in 1993, declared war and the administration at the time couldn't be bothered doing anything about it - or even take the time to visit the site that almost turned into a tomb for thousands.

Imagine that war was declared by Osama Bin Laden in the nineties - and no one in the administration took it seriously.

Imagine the Cole, the Khobar Towers, the embassy attacks, Zarqawi at the Olympic Hospital under the protection of Uday Hussein, the Boeing 707 at Baghdad's Salman Pak used to train an unknown number of hijackers...

Imagine a deadly litany of failures on the part of an administration too busy -- reading the weather vane of public opinion polls and covering up various scandals -- to do anything about the rise of extremist terror.

Finally, imagine you are at work bright and early on the 98th floor of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. About 9am, you hear a loud *whump*. And then the power goes out.

As you look at the picture of your wife and children sitting on your desk, smoke is rising in the sky, unfurling like giant black flags at your window.

This is the world in the hands of Bill Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and, yes, Jane Fonda. It is a world of politics, nuance and law-enforcement. And it is a world in which the Democrats, should they find themselves in power again, will get a lot more people killed.