Orson Scott Card on The Dems Campaigning

Orson Scott Card on The Dems Campaigning

War Watch - November 16, 2003 - The Campaign of Hate and Fear - The Ornery American

In one of Patrick O'Brian's novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars, he dismisses a particularly foolish politician by saying that his political platform was "death to the Whigs."

Watching the primary campaigns among this year's pathetic crop of Democratic candidates, I can't help but think that their campaigns would be vastly improved if they would only rise to the level of "Death to the Republicans."

Instead, their platforms range from Howard Dean's "Bush is the devil" to everybody else's "I'll make you rich and Bush is quite similar to the devil. . . ."

Am I saying that critics of the war aren't patriotic?

Not at all -- I'm a critic of some aspects of the war. What I'm saying is that those who try to paint the bleakest, most anti-American, and most anti-Bush picture of the war, whose purpose is not criticism but deception in order to gain temporary political advantage, those people are indeed not patriotic. They have placed their own or their party's political gain ahead of the national struggle to destroy the power base of the terrorists who attacked Americans abroad and on American soil. . . .

Think what it will mean if we elect a Democratic candidate who has committed himself to an anti-war posture in order to get his party's nomination.

Our enemies will be certain that they are winning the war on the battleground that matters -- American public opinion. So they will continue to kill Americans wherever and whenever they can, because it works.

Our soldiers will lose heart, because they will know that their commander-in-chief is a man who is not committed to winning the war they have risked death in order to fight. When the commander-in-chief is willing to call victory defeat in order to win an election, his soldiers can only assume that their lives will be thrown away for nothing. That's when an army, filled with despair, becomes beatable even by inferior forces.