Treasonous Kennedy!

Apparently many found Kennedy's words the other day approaching treason as I do. There's plenty of examples but thanks to my dad for sending me the blog post of the managing editor of the Washington Times from Thursday...

None dare call it treason
For many Americans Sen. Ted Kennedy has long been a caricature of liberal elitism, the bloated shell of what once was the youthful beauty of change. He has long lost the ability to shock with his antics, whether it's his questionable private behavior, returning the outreach of the Bush family with cheap shots galore or playing so loose with the facts in his public pronouncements that Jane Fonda looks like an intellectual heavyweight by comparison.

But wait, there's fire in the old warhorse yet. In a speech in Washington today, Mr. Kennedy became the first senator to call for the early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Drawing a parallel with the Vietnam war (why is it that liberals are so hot to champion U.S. failure?), he declared that "the U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. We need a new plan that sets fair and realistic goals for self-government in Iraq, and works with the Iraqi government on a specific timetable for the honorable homecoming of our forces."

In other words, let's ignore the sacrifice of those who have died to defeat a brutal dictator and to establish a fledgling democracy in the heart of the Middle East, and get the hell out as quickly as we can. Now that's statesmanship. Three days before courageous Iraqis risk their lives to vote in their first-ever democratic election. Now that's timing. To appease the Saddam holdovers who are brutally killing and maiming their own women and children to return to power. Now that's the American way.

And this is the man regarded by many as the senior statesman of the Democratic Party.
-- Fran Coombs, Managing Editor

More...from WSJ's Taranto Best of the Web on Friday...just a small piece:

A successful election in Iraq will be a triumph for the Bush doctrine and the strongest rebuke yet to those Democrats who learned from Vietnam that America is a force for ill in the world. Ted Kennedy is, as The Wall Street Journal puts it today, "cheerleading for America to fail" because his ideology leaves him unfit to cope with American success. If he has his way, democracy in Iraq will suffer the same fate as Mary Jo Kopechne.