Responding to the Response

Hugh Hewitt brings us "An essay from an active duty officer with more than 25 years of service, addressed to his fellow USNA alum, Senator James Webb."

The essay is serious and forthright. Those who opposed Webb's Senate election and disagreed with his SOTU response will enjoy it. I know I did. One could criticize it for a bit of "SwiftBoating." I don't use that word as pejoratively as Senator Kerry, but I think that O'Neill and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth erred when they mixed personal and trivial allegations with those that were far more serious.

In this essay (the officer is active duty and the piece is anonymous), the suggestion is made that the prickly, angry, ex-Republican, ex-SecNavy is still nursing a grudge over a "brigades" boxing match he lost to LTC Oliver North. It's an interesting bit of history and a better bit of gossip, seconded by another "boat school" alum who thought the same.

In the end, that critique has a little too much Oprah in it. I don't think it is fair to psychoanalyze Webb over the TV. Yet the same article makes serious points about the history of war from Thucydides and the history of the Democrats from the Civil War:

What we are witnessing today is the return of the worst hits of the Democratic Party. Going back to the American Civil War, Democrats were against THAT war and tried mightily to undermine President Lincoln. Those Democrats became known as Copperheads or Peace Democrats and, these were labels of which they were proud. They wanted the president to negotiate a peace with the Confederates and put an end to a far more bloody war than the war in Iraq when things were going so very wrong for the Union. So there is a long history of this behavior in the Democratic Party. There was a time they could only envision defeat, not victory. This was NOT true during WW I or WW II, but now the Democrats love to bring up Vietnam and the loss suffered there, and it remains for them the measuring stick against which all US military action MUST be compared. James Webb is a product of that policy failure and he is clearly embittered by it.

A great weekend-length read. As one commenter said:

Remind me NEVER to cross a Naval officer or Marine.

You'd think some folks would learn...

Second Bush Administration Posted by jk at January 27, 2007 1:21 PM