David Limbaugh
Friday, Jan. 7, 2005

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  Any demand the Democratic Party leadership makes for Republicans to demonstrate collegiality and bipartisanship can be dismissed on the order of a cheap "Saturday Night Live" joke. They have about as much interest in getting along with President Bush and the Republican Party as Sen. John Kerry has in inviting John O'Neill to join his supper club.

Just look at the events of the last week or so alone involving the South Asian tsunami disaster, the relentless attacks on Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales and the official challenge in Congress to the presidential election results.

Consider the Left's feigned outrage at President Bush's response to the tsunami disaster. Tell me if I'm mistaken, but wasn't one of their primary complaints that President Bush blew a golden opportunity to demonstrate to the world, and especially Muslims, how much we care about the victims and how much compassion we have?

The point was not actually to care or do something altruistic and constructive, but to show how much we care. (You can read the New York Times and other liberal editorialists and commentators to confirm this.)

And why is it so important, according to the form-over-substance Left, that we show we care? Well, they say, it's because we need to prove to the Muslim world that we aren't the bad guys in this war. After all, the enemy recruits radical Muslims from the general Muslim population, and so we must go out of our way to prove how much we care to deter further terrorist recruitment.

Let's accept, for purposes of discussion, that such appearances are as important as the Left tells us and for the very reasons they say. Then let's consider their behavior in light of that concern.

We all know - and the Left is part of the "we" here - that America is consistently the most generous nation in the world using any measuring yardstick. And aside from the Left's disingenuous criticisms of President Bush for not reacting quickly, sympathetically, and forcefully enough, they know we will be abundantly philanthropic toward the tsunami victims, in both our public and private capacities.

Well, if it's appearances they are concerned with, especially as they relate to convincing Muslims of the world of our benevolence, then can someone tell me why on earth they all lined up to condemn President Bush and the United States for being stingy? There is scarcely any possibility that their orchestrated condemnation of Bush and America as stingy didn't do immeasurably more damage to our relationship with Muslims than anything President Bush did in the days immediately following the disaster.

What's the lesson here? It is that the Left's goal is not to show America cares or to curry favor with the Muslim world, but to discredit President Bush and Republicans.

And while we're on the subject of wooing Muslims to believe in American benevolence, how do we explain the Democrats' public flailing of President Bush's Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales for internal legal memos that addressed the legal scope of torture against enemy combatant prisoners and detainees? These people know that Mr. Gonzales was not condoning torture even against this barbaric enemy. And they know how specious are their claims that these memos created a climate conducive to "Abu Ghraibs." Yet they are clearly implying otherwise in public hearings that will be heard loudly and clearly throughout the Muslim world and probably used as a terrorist recruiting tool. Again, nothing must interfere with their mission to discredit the Bush administration.

How about the Democrats' formal objection to certification of the presidential election results? They know that there was no widespread voter fraud by the GOP. But even if they deny that, many of them, including Barack Obama, have admitted that whatever irregularities may have occurred, there weren't enough to have altered the outcome of the election. Yet they are engaged now, as they were in 2000, in publicly undermining the integrity and reputation of our electoral system, based on trumped up, absurd, conspiracy theories of voter fraud with no substantiating evidence. Here again, they are dragging this nation through the mud for base partisan gain.

Is there any chance that good men and women of the party will ever dissent from the party's corrupt leadership? Now is the time for all good Democrats to come to the aid of their country.

COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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