In Denial

The left is convinced that there is no War on Terror. Here is a typical example from the Huffington Post.

A lot of people who oppose the Iraq War say the Afghanistan War was justified, but I'm not so sure: it wasn't Afghanistan who attacked us, and even if they were hiding Osama, the thing to do would have been to have him extradited.

Except we demanded that bin Laden be extradited and the Taliban threatened us.

Or maybe 9-11 wasn't the beginning after all. We know the Iraq War was being planned before 9-11, and probably the concurrent crackdown on constitutional liberties as well. The Bush cabal was just waiting for a Pearl Harbor-type incident to implement its plans.

This is a recurring theme - Bush knew ahead of time and was already planning to abridge civil liberties. Why? Because he's evil. Bwaa ha ha!

Other examples of denial - in 2004, the Democrats insisted that Bush was manipulating the terror alerts. There were no real threats to America, They were just distractions.

The current version of this is that recent terrorist arrests are not real. The group in Florida is dismissed as "just teenagers" who were all talk. The Canadian group is similarly dismissed. After all, they didn't even have any explosive (they would have if they had contacted a real supplier instead of a government agent).

At first the Left's reaction to the British bombing plot was the same - just Bush manufacturing a terrorist plot in order to distract people from the "historic" win by Lamont. They backed off a bit when it was pointed out that this came from the Blair government. Next articles such as this one started appearing insisting that the poor terrorists could never have actually created a working bomb in flight. The Left jumped on this. The Brits jumped the gun at Bush's urgings in order to take the heat off of Israel. The terrorists were all talk.

The fact that the terrorists were already booking test flights and making martyrdom videos shows that they thought that they could make bombs. Never mind all of that. The American Left knows best.

There is a reason for this pattern of denial. As long as the War on Terror or on Islamic Fascists is real then a reasonable person might agree with some or all of Bush's actions, especially domestic ones such as the Patriot Act and wiretapping foreign agents, even if they call the US.

Ironically, the wiretapping was an element in gathering information on the British terrorists.

But, is there is no war of terror then we are back to Bush grabbing power because he is evil. For some reason, the Left wants to believe that the President of the United States is an evil dictator who plots to see Americans dead so that he can advance his nefarious plans. This is more comforting to them then the idea that foreigners might want to kill Americans for reasons that pre-date the Bush administration.

For a group that thinks of themselves as "Reality-based", they are living in a fantasy land.

I wonder how they are going to explain away the newest reports - the British found explosives. See here. The video announcing the finds is here.

"However, we must be realistic. The threat from terrorism is real, it is here, it is deadly and it is enduring."