Breast Cancer Screening: Government Fires First Volley Of Rationing, Death By Medical Neglect

Let me begin by saying that the current versions of ObamaCare don’t have a single death panel.

It’s more like 111 separate death panels.

Some of the names  and acronyms of the dozens and dozens of bureaucracies are undoubtedly different under the new iteration of socialized medicine, but here’s a snapshot of your new health care system if Democrats get their way:

The Senate version is 2,075 pages of fun, I hear.  Nobody understands it.  And nobody is going to end up getting a chance to read it by the time it gets voted on.

If you thought that there was going to be any kind of transparency or accountability – or even honesty – from the Obama administration – you need to stop smoking your crack pipe.

This latest event in the march toward socialized medicine reminds me of the case of Barbara Wagner.  In Oregon, which has “universal coverage” through the state, she was abandoned to die by a system that would not pay for her cancer treatment, but offered to pay for her euthanasia.

Only this time, the government wants to deny treatment on the other side of the cancer diagnosis.

IBD Editorials

Rationing’s First Step

Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn’t that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn’t work.

We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing.  New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise.

Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the Health and Human Services Department as a “best practices” study group, was shouting its concern about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a 1% drop in the number of women regularly undergoing such screening and prevention.

The task force was saying that women older than 40 should get a mammogram every one to two years. It found that frequent screening lowered death rates from breast cancer mostly for women ages 50 to 69. But that was then, and this is now.

“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does save lives,” Diana Petiti, task force vice chairman, said of the recommendations published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening.”

Now the panel recommends that women in their 40s stop having routine annual mammograms and that older women should cut back to every two years. The concern allegedly is that too frequent testing can result in increased anxiety, false positives, unneeded follow-up tests and possibly disfiguring biopsies.  Preventing breast cancer and saving lives almost get lost in the new analysis.

“I have a particular concern in this case about who was involved in this task force,” says Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who was a heart surgeon in private life. “There are no surgeons or oncologists who deal directly with breast cancer or even radiologists. … I’ve seen far too many young women develop late-stage breast cancer because they didn’t have adequate screening.”

Little, if anything, has happened medically in the last six months to cause such a shift. A lot, however, has happened politically as a health care overhaul has limped forward on life support. The Congressional Budget Office has been busy pricing these various bills, a process that includes screening and prevention.

As we have warned, the growing emphasis seems to be on cost containment rather than quality of care. About 39 million women undergo mammograms each year in America, costing the health care system more than $5 billion.

“The American Cancer Society continues to recommend annual screening using mammography and clinical breast examination for all women beginning at age 40,” says Otis Brawley, its chief medical officer. “Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider.”

Daniel Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School, says: “Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and those idiots want to do away with it. It’s crazy — unethical, really.”

This, sadly, appears to be the future of medicine under government-run health care. Aside from taxes on insurers, providers and device manufacturers, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in cost-effectiveness boards that will decide who gets what tests and treatments, when and if. These are only recommendations for now, but they are the shape of things to come.

An IBD/TIPP poll found that 45% of medical doctors would consider retiring if the Congressional health care “reform” passes.  Given the fact that an increasing shortage of doctors is already one of the chief burdens in providing health care, this exodus would amount to a catastrophe that our health system would never recover from.

In Canada, the chronic doctor shortage has been bad enough that patients literally have to sign up for a lottery in order to have a chance to “win” a primary care physician.  But now we are learning that overwhelmed Canadian doctors are using a lottery of their own to dump patients.

Why on earth would anyone want this for America?

The Obama administration is preparing the health delivery system to implement the philosophy of Obama advisers such as Robert Reich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Cass Sunstein, which can be easily summarized with the quote:

“It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”

Robert Reich’s words in context only make the hateful idea sound even more hateful:

And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”

Then there are the words of Obama’s Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who wrote:

“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”

And Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Obama appointed as his OMB health policy adviser in addition to selecting him to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research wrote:

“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”

“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.”  Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care.  Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”

And Obama himself told a woman who wanted to keep her aging mother alive:

“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”

YOU take the painkiller rather than have that lifesaving surgery, Barry Hussein.  And why don’t you insist that Michelle and your two daughters take the pill rather than have that lifesaving surgery, too?  Just to be like all the “little people” out there.

But of course that’s not going to happen.  Rather, Democrats have now exempted themselves from 11 separate amendments that would have required them to have the same ObamaCare that they want to force everyone else to have.

You can understand why they would do so, given the promises that the system will be worse than terrible, and due to the fact that even a complete idiot who looks around and sees how horribly the administration has managed the H1N1 vaccine situation can recognize that taking on 1/6th of the economy would be beyond catastrophic.  I mean, heck, if I were a Democrat, I’d be sure to exempt myself from this monstrosity too, lest MY family members fall under the coming steamroller.

This “recommendation” of reducing mammographies isn’t mandatory now, but that’s because the government hasn’t usurped the health care system yet.  You just wait a decade from now, when the government runs everything, and soaring deficits force them to start cutting costs.

Obama’s Hypocritical Denunciation of Wright Is Too Little, Too Late

Barack Obama has decided it was time to pack up the campaign bus and move on. But before pulling out this time, Obama finally decided to throw his pastor under it.

“I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Obama said in a last-minute press conference today. The candidate said that after watching Wright’s appearance from Monday, “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

I’d sure like to know whether Barack Obama was in his church – as so many Americans were – the Sunday following 9/11 when Wright offered one of his most inflammatory ravings of all. But this issue has exploded beyond such questions.

It’s frankly way past time Obama repudiated Jeremiah Wright. He should never have attended the extremely radicalized Trinity United Church in Chicago in the first place. He should have walked away in outrage twenty years ago.

Given full, repeated opportunites to show how he had been “taken out of context,” Jeremiah Wright instead demonstrated that he stood by every “sound bite” he had spoken exactly as it had been depicted. He does believe America is a terrorist nation who deserves terrorist attacks to be directed against it. He does believe that white America created AIDS as a genocide against people of color. He didn’t back away or in any way change the context of any of his radical statements.

By speaking out, Rev. Jeremiah Wright reveals that the “spin” that much of the media – and Barack Obama himself – had been putting on the story for the last couple months was a flat-out lie. These were not sound bites taken out of context. It was malicious to claim that Wright’s sermons had been deliberately taken out of context, because the charge was an attempt to assasinate the characters and reputations of men and women who are now revealed to have been right all the time.

You may despise Fox News’ Sean Hannity and love PBS’ Bill Moyers, but Hannity has been demonstrated to be the objective source, and Moyers the biased ideologue.

Conservatives keep saying that the elite media is biased to the left, and the elite media keeps proving that the allegation is completely true. You have only to go back and review every story that characterized Jeremiah Wright’s remarks as “soundbites” and “thirty second loops” spun “out of context” to see that the media was doing its own spinning out of a pro-liberal and pro-Obama agenda.

For the most part, there was simply no possible context that could have made most of these remarks palatable. America with three Ks, America as a terrorist state, America as a racist developer of genocidal death-viruses. Good luck with that, “What-the-Reverend-really-meant-to-say”-project.

But we still have another spin on this story. We still have the excuse that somehow Barack Obama never heard any of this stuff, and just didn’t know it was going on for all these years.

I can see it now:

Several thousand people settle into their pews as the worship team finishes leading the music.  Rev. Wright steps into the pulpit  to preach. The auditorium quiets down.

“Is he here?” The doormen charged with monitoring Barack Obama’s attendance shake their heads.

“Well, then, America is still the No. 1 killer in the world. . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers . . . We bombed Cambodia, Iraq and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi . . . We put Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.! We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost!”

And then a security radio crackles in with a report that Barack Obama has driven in and is walking toward the auditorium.

“And Jesus said, love your enemies. Do good to them that hate you,” Wright sweetly and sublimely preaches as Obama files in and takes a pew.

The rest of the congregation smiles knowlingly. And the vast conspiracy, which has succeeded in keeping Barack Obama completely in the dark for twenty years, has succeeded yet again.

The problem with this scenario is that the facts simply say otherwise. Allow me to quote myself from 19 April:

First of all, it is a frankly incredible claim. Barack Obama spent 20 years in this church, and 20 years in an intimate personal mentoring friendship with Jeremiah Wright. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. has been well-known for being a fiery radical way out of the mainstream ever since he coming to the church in 1972. The fact that Wright married Barack and Michelle and baptized their children are only embarrasing details. And Barack Obama had no idea what his mentor for twenty years stood for? When the Reverend Wright delivered a particularly offensive, hateful and anti-American sermon, no one ever told Obama about it? The fact is, in his 1993 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama himself reveals this argument for the lie it is. In a vivid description recalling his first meeting with Wright back in 1985, the pastor warned Barack Obama that getting involved with Trinity might turn off other black clergy because of the church’s radical reputation. And when Obama disinvited Jeremiah Wright to give the convocation speach at his announcement of his presidential campaign last year, he essentially told his pastor that he was too extreme for Barack to openly associate himself with him.  Obama knew.

When the video of Rev. Wright’s hateful, racist, anti-American rants first became public, the Obama campaign indignantly indicated that there was nothing worthy of bothering itself about. They had no problem with anything Wright had said. Later in the day, as the video of the ranting pastor spread, the campaign offered a lame dodge. A little after that, Obama himself offered that he’s never heard any of the remarks. Then he gave his speech saying, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

And, of course, the left-leaning media swooned over the speech.

Well, I guess now he’s disowning the black church.  Sorry grandma. You gotta go.

Obama personally records the warning that Wright gave him about the church’s radicalism. The only thing that changed since that day in 1985 was that Barack Obama’s political ambitions have grown to the point where his twenty-year “association” (a word the liberal media loves to use to imply a bogus “guilt by association”) is no longer expedient for a man who had used the influence of Trinity United and its pastor to climb the ladder in Chicago politics. Obama had found the church offered him street credibility with common black folk as well as powerful local connections. And now he finds it politically expedient to bite the hand that fed him.

Obama chooses some interesting words to describe his reason for distancing himself from Wright. “What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for.”

Jeremiah Wright’s worldview has not changed. He is presenting the same worldview that he has been presenting for twenty years.

Let me quote myself again from 15 April, and note that I specifically refer to Jeremiah Wright’s worldview:

When revelations of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-American remarks first began to surface, Democratic supporters of Barack Obama quickly claimed that these were just a few comments that were taken out of context. But when one considers black liberation theology, and when one listens to the words of numerous other black liberation theology theologians, this defense quickly becomes untenable.

When Jeremiah Wright talked about “white greed” in his now-famous “Audacity of Hope” message, he was perfectly expounding on black liberation thought. When he claimed that white America deliberately created the AIDS virus as a genocide against blacks, he was accurately exegeting black liberation ideology of class based warfare against the oppressed black class. Or, expressed negatively, when he said that anti-crack cocaine penalties were instituted by racist legislators for the purpose of incarcerating as many blacks as possible, how was that in any way contrary to his central theological beliefs? When Wright denounced Israel as a Zionist state that imposed “injustice and … racism” on Palestinians, how was this not in perfect accord with his theology? When Wright railed against “AmeriKKKa” in his sermons, just how was that contrary to black liberation thought? And when Wright lectured American society that it deserved 9/11, was this in any way out of bounds with either the teachings of black liberation theologians or the Marxism from which they derived their message?

Has Barack Obama, the Harvard Law School graduate, the former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and full-fledged elitist intellectual snob, somehow been totally unaware of black liberation theology? Was he totally unaware of the teachings of his church? Was he completely ignorant of the beliefs of the man who led him to his faith, who married him, who bapatized his children, and who taught him and mentored him for twenty years?

Get real.

Now the Obama campaign is pitching itself as the poor victim of this crazy Jeremiah Wright. And the media is just gobbling it up. But a New York Post story coming out today quotes a source that is problably closer to the mark; that the pastor felt betrayed by a man who had once embraced him as a friend, a mentor, and a spiritual guide. That the pastor feels betrayed that Obama is now distancing himself from views that he knew Wright had had for years and years.

Joe Scarborough is claiming that now that Obama has finally come out and denounced Wright that no one can bring this up any more, as though by sheer brute force of ultra-left-wing will can overcome every question and doubt that this relationship so justifiably raises. What is this guy putting in his coffee?

The media spins, and most of the media spins fast and furiously left. But the truth of the matter is that Barack Obama’s central campaign theme is, and has always been, a fraud. There’s nothing new about him, he isn’t the candidate of hope, and the change he will bring will only be for the worse.

Barack Obama’s close and long-term relationship with Jeremiah Wright calls his character, his honesty, his integrity, and his own beliefs into open question. Should we believe his current campaign spin, or should we believe his actions over the last twenty years?

Petraeus, Clinton, Obama, and All Democrats: Will The One With Credibility Please Stand Up?

As General David Petraeus returns to the US Senate to report on the war in Iraq, it is worth reminiscing on what occurred last time he appeared.

Yes, we had our front page ad “General Betray Us?” in that appeared in the New York Times with a sweetheart rate that violated the papers’ own standard of ethics.

But we also had that bastion of personal integrity – the junior Senator from New York – question the honesty and credibility of the general.

I cite a 12 Sep 2007 New York Sun story that appeared under the headline, “Clinton Spars With Petraeus on Credibility.” The first two paragraphs of that story by staff reporter Eli Lake read as follows:

“WASHINGTON — Senator Clinton squared off yesterday with her possible challenger for the White House in 2012, General David Petraeus, and came closer than any of her colleagues to calling the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq a liar.

Using blunter language than any other Democrat in the last two days, Mrs. Clinton told General Petraeus that his progress report on Iraq required “a willing suspension of disbelief.””

Well, let’s reflect on that a bit. Hindsight being what it is and all.

We now know that Senator Clinton is a documented liar on numerous fronts (her story of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia has been refuted by video of the event; her story of playing a role in the Ireland peace talks has been refuted by a Nobel Prize winning participant in addition to other participants; her story of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was refuted by that stain on the blue dress, etc. etc.).

I saw a biography of General David Petraeus on Fox News after he was named to command the multinational forces in Iraq, and was frankly awed by the man’s history of character and integrity. His entire life is a study in character and honor. He took control over a situation that had been presented as hopeless and turned it around in a manner that can only be described as stunning. By the time he appeared before the Senate last year, he had come through for this nation in a way that merited the gratitude of every American, and in particular every parent who sent a son or daughter to Iraq under his command. And as a reward this true American hero was attacked by demagogues who will never even begin to understand the character and integrity that David Petraeus has demonstrated throughout his life.

Mind you, Senator Clinton has hardly cornered the market on vicious attacks against American heroes:

Jay Rockefeller, the Senator from West Virginia, launched an incredibly hateful statement against Senator John McCain in an interview with the Charleston Gazette. He said McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. According to the paper, Rockefeller said “McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Rockefeller later apologized for his comment, but you can’t just take back a statement like that, can you? It was inexcusable, and frankly unforgivable. Rockefeller not only attacked JohnMcCain; he attacked every American serviceman who ever fired a weapon against an enemy during time of war.

This Senator Jay Rockefeller, by the way, is the same Jay Rockefeller who has positioned himself as a major Barack Obama supporter, and who recently urged that – for the good of the country – Senator Clinton should drop out of the Democratic primary and support Barack Obama. You can thus add him to the list of associates of Barack Obama who have said and/or done terrible things against America (e.g. Obama’s pastor for twenty years’ [Jeremiah Wright] racist charge that America created the AIDS virus to kill black people; his wife Michelle Obama’s statement that “America in 2008 is a mean place” which itself followed a similar statement that she had never been proud of America in her adult life; Barack Obama’s friend (as acknowledged by Obama’s own strategist David Axelrod) and former Weatherman Terrorist Professor William Ayers – who openly acknowledged bombing attacks after 9/11 – and claimed to have no regrets over them).

[As to William Ayers, it is frankly amazing that this man – who has openly acknowledged bombing the New York Police Headquarters as well as the Capital building and other locations and said on 9/11 that his only regret is that he didn’t bomb enough – is now an honored member of the liberal education establishment and a significant member of his community in Chicago, Illinois. You begin to see more clearly the absolutely toxic political environment that Barack Obama has emerged from].

Now, that last paragraph will be immediately dismissed by those who argue that you can’thold one’s associations against someone. So it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama sat in a pew for twenty years under the teachings of a documented America-hating racist. But it certainly goes to his judgment and his integrity. Michelle Obama has clearly been influenced by her pastor’s teachings, and Barack Obama has whitewashed several of Reverend Wright’s sermons and teachings – by removing the anti-white rantings but holding on to the substance – for mass consumption. Wright railed against “white greed” in his “Audacity of Hope” message. Obama rephrases it to say, “The greatest problem in America is greed.” Obama leaves it up to you to recognize that he’s talking about “white” greed.

And also mind you, Senator Clinton has hardly cornered the market on telling self-serving lies or padding her resume.

A Snopes.com article details some of Barack’s lies and provides their refutations. While Hillary Clinton’s lie can be seen exposed in vivid, hillarious color, Barack Obama is an even bigger documented liar than she when it comes to rewriting history to fabricate his own story. Barack Obama massively fabricated his association with President Kennedy: his father did NOT come to the United States with Kennedy money. And his mother were NOT inspired to marry and have a child by the Selma march as Barack Obama claimed: the first of the marches did not occur until at least five years after Barack was born!

Furthermore, Obama has lied about numerous aspects of his past in an attempt to bolster his credentials. He claimed on numerous occasions that he was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago: he was no such thing. He was a lecturer only. There is as gigantic a distinction between “professor” and “lecturer” as there is between “sniper fire”and “there had been reports of possible sniper fire in the area.”

Obama has also boasted of having passed legislation that in reality never even left committee. And fellow organizers have said that Sen. Obama took too much credit for his community organizing efforts.

An 8 April 2008 Time Magazine article by Mark Halperin details the above “misstatements” and many others. Basically, it chops Obama’s credibility down like a tree.

Another clear Obama lie has been his profound mischaricterization of John McCain as saying that McCain “wants the war to last for a hundred years.” Asked whether he would support U.S. troops staying in Iraq for fifty years, McCain said, ““Make it a hundred. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as American, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” The non-partisan Factcheck.org says Obama’s claim that McCain wants 100 years of war in Iraq is a “twisted” and “serious distortion of what McCain actually said. So much for the candidate of hope and change, and so much for claiming to run and honest campaign.

Barack Obama’s biggest lie of all may well be the central promise of his entire campaign that – as the candidate of undefined “hope” and “change” – he can bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives. In reality, Barack Obama – winner of the prestigious “Most Liberal Senator of 2007 Award” handed out by the National Journal as determine by voting record – has established himself as a radically left of center politician. He is currently having to distance himself from his own views. An Illinois voter group’s detailed questionnaire, filed under his name during his 1996 bid for a state Senate seat, presents extremely liberal stands on gun control, the death penalty and abortion – positions that appear completely at odds with the more moderate image he’s projected during his presidential campaign. Yet another lie, I believe. In running for president, Barack Obamama must literally run away from himself.

Thus the Democratic primary becomes a question of “Which liar told bigger lies?” And, “Which group cares more about which lie?”

Meanwhile, General David Petraeus’ character, honesty, and integrity stands out like the giant Gulliver must have stood out among the Lilliputians.

But let’s not be too harsh on Senator Hillary Clinton or Senator Barack Obama. They are Democrats, after all. What do you really expect? They come from the Party of Bill Clinton, who sought to become our Commander in Chief in spite of his letter directly expressing his “loathing the military” (a direct quote completely accurate in context).

The Democratic Party is the party of Senator John Kerry, who said of American soldiers:

“I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal andvery particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

The Democratic Party is the party of Senator Dick Durbin, who – on the floor of the U.S. Senate – compared American soldiers to Nazis, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention facility with Soviet Gulags. Durbin’s comment resonated in perfect pitch with actress Jane Fonda’s calling U.S. soldiers war criminals during her visit to North Vietnam in 1972. And I give as my source an al Jazeera article to demonstrate just how harmful to the United States – and how helpful to our vicious enemies – statements such as Durbin’s really are.

The Democratic Party is the party of Representative Jack Murtha, who went on record as the first on-the-record U.S. official regarding the events that took place with U.S. Marines in Haditha. Before any investigation – and certainly before any trial – Murtha said, “Well, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. One Marine was killed and the Marines just said we’re going to take care – we don’t know who the enemy is, the pressure was too much on them, so they went into houses and they actually killed civilians.”

In another interview Murtha said, “There was no firefight. There was no IED that killed those innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them. And they killed innocent civilians in cold blood. That is what the report is going to tell. ”

The aftermath should demonstrate just how despicable Murtha was in publicly convicting these young Marines without a trial. Charges have been repeatedly dropped. Others have been acquitted. One Marine – clearly believing the zealous prosecution line – agreed to testify against another Marine. Thus far, the Marines have been vindicated. The results of subsequent investigations have clearly exonerated the Marines. Again and again, the details provided by Marines confirmed their story; again and again, the details alleged by the Iraqi witnesses have been demonstrated to be false.

I have heard Murtha apologists claim that Murtha himself was a Marine and therefore his character should be beyond question. Well, so was Lee Harvey Oswald! Should we therefore not question his character?!?! As a further observation, I find a former Marine railroading fellow Marines to be even more contemptible than a non-Marine railroading Marines. It’s like finding out that the man who publicly and maliciously framed you was your own father; there’s just something profoundly wrong with the moral wiring of a man who does this kind of thing.

The Democratic Party is the Party of Representatives Jim McDermott of Washington and David Bonior of Michigan, who, back in 29 Sep 2002 appeared on This Week from the foreign (make that enemy) soil Baghdad and blasted U.S. foreign policy. Their clear point was that Americans should believe the documented torturer and murderer Saddam Hussein and distrust Republican President George Bush. During the course of this on-air fiasco, a clearly stunned George Will said of McCermott and Bonior’s vicious remarks, “”Why Saddam Hussein doesn’t pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know.”

Well, it turns out he did.

We now know that – in the opening words of a recent AP article – that “Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. An indictment unsealed in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a member of a Michigan nonprofit group, of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam’s regime.” See the full article at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080326/ap_on_re_us/iraq_junket

Even if these Democratic Congressmen didn’t know they were being used by Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence, their actions were beneath all contempt. These elected American officials allowed themselves to be used as pawns by the intelligence agency of a ruthless tyrant.

The Democratic Party is the party of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who said “This war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything” on 20 April 2007. Again, I offer as my source al Jazeera to show just how harmful such statements can be to us, and how they can and ARE being used to embolden our enemies.

Anyone who is capable of stepping back from political party partisanship for just a moment ought to have difficulty with a leader who so blithely claims defeat for his country in time of war. Winston Churchill famously said, “We will never give up! We will never surrender!” Henry Reid says, “This war is lost.” Thank God Churchill didn’t think that way, or we’d all be speaking German. As it is – if the terrorists and over a billion Muslims have their way – we might well all end up speaking Arabic.

And the Democratic Party is the party of House Majority Whip Representative James Clyburn, who acknowledged in an inverview on 30 July 2007 before General Petraeus’ first report that good news inIraq amounted to a problem for Democrats.

As General David Petraeus wraps up his visit to the snake pit of Washington, don’t forget who the Democrats are. They are the Party that is invested in American failure, the Party that roots for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan for the sake of opportunistic political advantage.

Christopher Hitchens has a piece in Slate.com titled, “Flirting With Disaster: The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.” It’s definitely worth reading.

I often wonder: had the Democrats continued to support the war that was authorized by a vote of 77-23 in the Senate (with 29 Democrats supporting [Senator Clinton among them] and only 21 opposed) and 296-133 in the House, and presented the world with a united front, how different could things have turned out? Would our enemies have remained emboldened in the face of steadfast American resolve? Would our allies have continued to refuse to help us had we presented a united face determined to prevail against the forces of international terrorism?

Imagine what would have happened in World War II had Republicans done everything they could have done to undermine, question, distort, and misrepresent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt? Imagine what would have happened had Republicans en masse called for a withdrawal from the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan? Had they characterized American fighting men as war criminals? Had they demanded that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur come to Senate and defend themselves against charges that they were dishonest and incompetent? Do you think it would have helped or hurt the war effort? [This amounts to an IQ test, Democrats: and you have failed horribly].

For the Democrats to turn against the President in time of war and work to undermine American efforts to attain victory out of political opportunism is both craven and cowardly.

If good news in Iraq is bad news for Democrats, then Americans should hope for nothing less than really, really bad news for Democrats this November.