Full Moonbats

UPDATE: Sean Penn sighting!

Congressman John Conyers (Moonbat-Mich.) complains, seeks censure of the President and Vice President, inspiring and assisting various surrender-now groups organizing January 7th rallies that drew self-counted crowds of 40 (Tidewater, VA and Santa Barbara, CA), 70 (Morristown, NJ), 155 (Salida, CO), and 300 (Tacoma, WA). A quick search of Conyers' websites and publications turned up no acknowledgment of improvements in the lives of ordinary Iraqis, nor any alternative strategy for toppling Saddam or fostering middle-East democracy. To be fair, Conyers might be distracted by other pet policies: reparations and government-funded universal health insurance.

Another Moonbat in the news is UNICEF "Goodwill" Ambassador Harry Belafonte, who (along with anti-Bush actor Danny Glover and Princeton professor Cornel West) visited Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez this weekend, attending Chavez's Sunday TV broadcast:

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people… support your revolution," Belafonte told Mr Chavez during the broadcast.

Belafonte previously claimed several high-ranking Nazis were Jews, sucked-up to Castro and called former Secretary of State Colin Powell a traitor to African Americans:

There are those slaves who lived on the plantation, and there were those slaves who lived in the house. You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master. Colin Powell was permitted to come into the house of the master.

Thankfully, not every lefty's in lockstep, destination cliff. Jonathan Freedland dare speaketh the question:

For a left liberal like me, it is not easy to commit heresy. After all, we are meant to be open-minded free thinkers, unshackled by taboos. Nevertheless there is one thought so heretical, merely to utter it would ensure instant excommunication. I hesitate even to pose it as a question. But here goes. What if George W Bush was to prove to be one of the great American presidents? . . .

The war removed one of the most hated tyrants of modern times, shifting Saddam Hussein from a palace to a prison cell. Couple that with the toppling of the Taliban, a regime of cruelty and brutal philistinism, and Bush's defenders have a powerful opening argument.

Next, they can point further afield. For didn't the war in Iraq, admittedly prosecuted at a high and bloody price, not set in train a wider series of events. Note Libya's rapid decision to come clean about, and abandon, its attempt to build weapons of mass destruction. Iran is a more complex case – rendered more complicated by the arrival of President Ahmadinejad – but it is clear that a faction, at least, within Iran's bifurcated government wishes to follow Libya's lead. The 2003 war established, through shock and awe, that any effort to go nuclear can bring terrible consequences.

There has been a chain reaction of a different kind, too. Lebanon is the clearest example, with its Cedar Revolution leading to an outburst of people power on the streets of Beirut – and the ejection of the Syrian occupier. Tentative moves toward electoral democracy have followed in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Bahrain. Even Syria seems, grudgingly, to understand that it lives in a changed region and that it too will have to adapt.

None of these advances should be exaggerated; they do not on their own amount to the flowering of “freedom and democracy” imagined so floridly in Bush's set-piece speeches. Those set out the belief that US interests are no longer served by propping up vile (if US-friendly) tyrants, but are best aided by the establishment of democracy. Yes, there are contradictions and hypocrisies, but that shift represents a break from at least 60 years of US foreign policy – and in the right direction. If Washington was to honour this ideal, articulated well by Bush, then the world would be a better place.

Of course, these recent changes in Lebanon and the like may come to nothing. But the opposite is at least possible. These shifts may deepen and spread. If the Iraqis do, despite everything, inch towards constitutional self-rule, the momentum may be hard to stop. People across the Muslim and Arab world will see that reform and democracy is real – and they will want some of it for themselves.

These are all big ifs. For every step forward Bush has inspired, there have been steps back: Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray have discredited the cause of US-led democracy more than Bush's warm words have promoted it. But change will eventually come to the Middle East, just as it came, eventually, to Eastern Europe. And, when it does, it is at least conceivable that the man future generations will credit as the pioneer will be none other than George W Bush.

The middle-East's a mess. America's previously tried containment, supporting strongmen, sanctions and isolationism--none worked. After 9/11, President Bush decided to change the paradigm.

Pundit Christopher Hitchens sees: "a race between the idea of federalism and democracy and the ideas of partition and theocracy, and the United States is on the right side of the argument. . . I would like to think that no one could view that with indifference." Yet many lefties never left the 1970s. Hitchens agrees that "an amazing number of people do view it with indifference and/or take the other side -- and I spend a lot of my time trashing them." As does BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb, quoted by reasoned lefty Norm Geras:

'For goodness sake...' Look at the facts on the ground, look at the way that Iraq was run before the invasion, look at Iran now, and then look, for instance, at America. I mean, can you seriously say that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the way they treat their own people and the way Americans treat theirs, the way they behave on the world stage...?

Dean/Pelosi-wing Democrats seriously say exactly that. So long as they do, don't take Moonbats seriously.

More:

Cindy Sheehan and Sean Penn spoke at the Sacramento rally, apparently playing "top the loony":

Cindy emphasized we must exit Iraq now to save precious lives. After expressing her support for a Dept. of Peace, Cindy concluded that she'd like to create a U.S. Dept. of History, with herself as the first secretary.

Actor Sean Penn added to the enthusiasm of the day by stressing that all of the nation's anti-war activism was taking hold and was starting to work—while admitting that the stress of living under the current administration was making it tough for him to quit smoking.

(via Norman Geras, RedState.Org, LGF, Michelle Malkin)