LSD: Living in the Sixties Democrats

"He was for the joke before he was against it."

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Michael Barone, writing in Real Clear Politics, says the problem with Democrats is that they are still stuck in the `60s. Those two sentences quoted above and spoken by John Kerry last week, tell a lot about the mindset of many -- not all, but many -- Democrats who supported him for president in 2004 and who, as this is written, are looking forward to Democratic victories this week. One thing they tell us is that Kerry's mindset is still back in the Vietnam era.

Barone says no one is "stuck in Iraq" unless he or she volunteers. The educational and economic levels of our military personnel are higher than those of civilians in the same age group. It appears Kerry was thinking back to the late 1960s, when there was a military draft and a college dropout could find himself drafted and "stuck" in Vietnam.

Kerry's explanation for his bizarre refusal to apologize for two days and then his grudging off-camera apology was that he was trying to make a joke about the stupidity of George W. Bush (even though Kerry's grades at Yale were slightly lower than Bush's). But his words were not wholly out of line with previous statements by him and other Democrats characterizing American troops as perpetrators rather than heroes.

There was Kerry's 1971 "Genghis Khan" testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as well as his December 2005 statement that troops were "terrorizing" women and children. Sen. Dick Durbin likened American service members to Nazi storm troopers and the Khmer Rouge, and Sen. Edward Kennedy suggested that Abu Ghraib under our "new management" was comparable to Saddam Hussein's regime of torture and murder.

Kerry and his buddies feel they know best who our heroes should be . . . and they should not be members of the American military, who are portrayed as depraved or incompetent. They should be the antiwar protesters, the professors and intellectuals, the sophisticated elites who know better than ordinary Americans and the servicemen and women what's in the world's best interest.

Barone says our heroes should be people who believe that fighting those who want to destroy us only makes them madder and that withdrawal will assuage their grievances so they will leave us alone. It turned out that withdrawing from Vietnam did not cause us irretrievable damage. Barone asks will we be so lucky if we leave Iraq too soon?

For the good of the country, Democrats should quit the LSD and Let the Sixties Die.

Democrats Stuck in the '60s
By Michael Barone
(RCP) -- You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Read it.

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