Hugh Hewitt vs. Dennis the Menace

Hugh Hewitt makes an interesting observation today:

Reading through the conventional, warmed-over "wisdom" of the Beltway's media elite, the pack mentality shines through. They are, as a whole, fundamentally uninterested in whether President Bush's strategic understanding of the centrality of the battle for Iraq within the war with Islamic extremism is correct. Rather, they are intent on figuring out if the Democrats can muster enough votes to cut off funding for the war in a replay of the end of Vietnam. Thus they have converted the crucial debate of our time into a sequel about domestic politics. It is a template with which they are familiar and which their limited experience equips them to discuss. I am reminded of my question to Dennis Kucinich that stumped him: Was he aware of the Quds forces? It isn't just Congressman Kucinich who has failed to do minimal homework. It is also most of the media elite.

Hugh's link above to his probe of Cleveland's own Dennis the Menace is worth following, as evidenced by the following exchange:

HH: Do you...are you aware of the Quds forces?

DK: What are you talking about?

HH: The Quds forces from...they're an arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Are you familiar with them?

DK: (pause) Go ahead.

HH: Are you? Because I don't want to pursue it if you're not.

DK: Well, go ahead. I want to hear what you have to say.

HH: Well, they're operating in Iraq. Does that concern you?

DK: I think that we need to get the region involved in stopping the insurgency. And the way you do that, the first step you take, is to take away the energy that the insurgency is gaining from the occupation. Look, Iran...you know, we should be concerned about any nation feeling that they can advance their interests through the chaos and civil war of Iraq. And the way that you do it, you have to have a political settlement. We cannot solve this militarily. Most...and many generals who believe that.

HH: Pop quiz, Congressman. Do you know who the supreme leader of Iran is?

DK: (pause) You're talking about the religious leader?

HH: Yes.

DK: I can't tell you the name off-hand.

Of course not. The only thing this idiotarian knows is chapter and verse from his Bible of choice, Das Kapital, which he uses kind of like a Baltimore Catechism whose rote answers serve as substitutes for his lack of intellectual depth whenever he's out in the hustings.

He's no match for Hugh, as following the links here will amply demonstrate. Dennis, a hare-brained socialist punk from Cleveland who, as boy-wonder mayor of the city many years ago was notable for causing the city's massive fiscal default, is, like most lefties (they are not liberals as they would like you to believe), making up policy as he goes along, and the facts never matter, only feelings and righteous posturing. If it feels good, do it, particularly if there's no political cost, which there never is for a leftist Democrat whose flanks are always protected by the reliable hacks of the MSM. (Being a Democrat is never having to say you're sorry.)

The Quds phenomenon, of course, is not well known to the American public at large, simply because the media isn't interested in educating the public, which then might take a more positive view of "Bush's War" than the one they've been feeding Joe Sixpack since the first shots were fired to topple Saddam's genocidal regime. As a useful digression, let us supply a couple of excerpts that will fill you in on what Dennis doesn't know, based on revelations resulting from U.S. actions inside Iraq last month and just this week:

The news that American forces had captured Iranians in Iraq was widely reported last month, but less well known is that the Iranians were carrying documents that offered Americans insight into Iranian activities in Iraq.

An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force — the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads — is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.

The captured documents also revealed at least one interesting tidbit:

The news that Iran's elite Quds Force would be in contact, and clandestinely cooperating, with Sunni Jihadists who attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra (one of the holiest shrines in Shiism) on February 22, could shake the alliance Iraq's ruling Shiites have forged in recent years with Tehran. Many Iraq analysts believe the bombing vaulted Iraq into the current stage of its civil war.

Yep, it did. In other words, Sunni terrorists supported by Iranian Shia fundamentalist clerics and their minions destroyed what the latter regard as one of their holiest shrines. But they were happy to blow it up just to provoke their own fellow Shiites to wage jihad against Sunnis who were not terrorists, which gives you a pretty good idea of their priorities, which don't include reverence for sacred spaces that honor Allah. The adjective "byzantine" is the only appropriate way to describe this kind of tortured logic.

This proves once again, however, that, like good Islamofascists of all stripes, the Iranian Shia leadership places mass suffering and death ahead of their own professed religious beliefs and professed reverence for holy sites. (It doesn't say much about the intelligence of Sunni terrorists either, since the ensuing nonstop Sadrist vendetta has largely been waged against the Sunni flavor of Islam.) For more on this, and there is much more, link here.

Now that our brief social studies lesson has concluded, let's get back to Hugh's point. Namely that the Woodstock Generation is attempting, mindlessly as usual, a final reprise of their glorious victory over Richard Nixon in 1974, which resulted in epic genocide in Southeast Asia. This is otherwise known as a "political solution" to idiotarians of the Kucinich, Albright, and Brzezinski stripe. Hugh writes:

The consequences of an American defeat in Iraq are almost impossible to total, but the immediate aftermath would be a killing spree of the sort that could come to rival Cambodia's after we bugged out of Southeast Asia. Pol Pot imposed a "political settlement" in the '70s, just as Stalin, Mao, Saddam and all the other great killers of the last century did.

People opposing victory and demanding retreat are endorsing the aftermath --obvious and inevitable-- that would follow. That aftermath's violence would not be limited to the Middle East. It would travel, and soon. That's the bottom line, and that's what the debate should be about.

But it's not. Hugh blames the MSM for not helping educate the populace, and he's right on target. But these shallow elites are only partially to blame. A good chunk of the blame falls on the shoulders of the Republican Party as well. Cowed by half a century of namecalling from the left, which brings up charges of "McCarthyism" as frequently as it yells "racist" in crowded rooms, touchy Republicans who long, illogically, for the media adulation that will never be theirs, have been either culturally ignorant (a distinct possibility) or simply afraid to bring up charges of treason against America's virulently Stalinist and Gramscian left. McCarthy's ghost, as invoked by the left, is still apparently a major deterrent. (Only Ronald Reagan was able to overcome it consistently.)

Since Tail Gunner Joe took a bite out of their collective hide in the 1950s, the left has done its level best to subvert the government, most particularly the State Department; undermine the judiciary; commandeer a once-respectable political party; dominate all modes of communication save the web and to some extent talk-radio; destroy the American school system and the respectability and responsibility of the professoriate; and exterminate religion from the public arena. Had Republicans begun calling these idiots out on their massive subversion of the American Way of Life over the past century, we might not have come to this point. But the fact is, they did not, and now we're where we are today with America's left playing patty-cake with the Islamofascists with whom they share an enduring hatred of our wonderful, but rapidly declining country.

Whether he's out there with a wing and a prayer or a shoeshine and a smile, George Bush, whose tangled syntax sometimes resembles that of the late President Ford, is about the only thing that remains between us and the dhimmitude our recidivist, elitist Commies apparently crave. We can thank America's indefatigable hard left for that. But we can also thank the countless Republicans who lacked the guts to invite the leftists out back for a little vigorous dialogue when there was still time. They're peeling off Bush when he needs them most. "High Noon," anyone?