Mr. President: War Is Not A ‘Struggle’ Or ‘Situation’

by Mark Tapson

First, President Obama jettisoned the admittedly empty and useless phrase “war on terror,” a label which pleased pretty much no one, primarily because it didn’t specify an enemy; it’s often been pointed out that the phrase was like calling World War II a “war on blitzkrieg.” Next, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano avoided even mentioning the word “terrorism” in her first congressional testimony. Now the Department of Justice has announced it is dropping the legal designation “enemy combatants,” which referred to suspected terrorist detainees. The aim of all this muting of the language in the War with No Name is twofold: for the Obama administration to distance itself from George W. Bush’s “politics of fear,” and to whitewash a plain fact that liberals are suicidally reluctant to acknowledge - that we are at war with radical Islam.

Earlier this year the members of MoveOn.org identified liberals’ top ten priorities for 2009 in a poll. Their agenda is very revealing: nowhere among the list of usual suspects – stopping climate change, ending the war in Iraq, “restoring” civil liberties, holding the Bush administration “accountable” – is there any mention of national security or any acknowledgement that the United States even has an enemy – unless, of course, you count climate change and the Bush administration, two threats that the left has no problem confronting fiercely.  (more…)

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Posted Mar 20th 2009 at 5:02 am in Featured Story, News, Politics | 153 Comments