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The War on Terror: Where did the liberals go?

By Stephen A. McDonald
web posted November 25, 2002

We all know that for a short period after September 11th, our country was unified, and all sides of the political spectrum saw the need for standing against radical Islam. In the weeks immediately following a period of national unity, liberals came out of the woodwork, seemingly justifying a "just" war. After all, these are the people that hijacked four airliners and, we're told, the religion of a billion people, but perhaps most terribly- made women cover their heads in public.

A Wall Street Journal editorial page article by Andrew Sullivan in October 2001, a prominent conservative yet homosexual writer, berated the Taliban for heinous crimes - including the persecution of homosexuals. Liberals, at the rate of a dime a dozen were finding ample reasoning in the retaliation of the attacks of September 11th and the liberation of oppressed groups that had taken the brute of an intolerant hate-filled regime.

My question is this: What happened to all the liberals? Their precise location is pretty easy to note, as they are either sitting in front of their computer screens clicking onto Barbra Streisand's webpage or at a rally listening to some Hollywood chump state that the real dictator is George Bush. In less than a year, liberals did an about face, from a cause that was supposed to be championing personal rights and freedoms in one of the most repressed areas of the world to mass rallies against the war hawks in the Bush Administration.

Like most people, liberals are pretty quick to spot the sincerity of things. In a stunning move, they briefly rallied around George Bush in not only a spit of post-attack patriotism, but in a move that brought some force to an otherwise limp set of causes. After all, fighting for homosexual rights has never drawn an especially masculine group of supporters, in the same manner; it was a novelty to attach military action to a cause that was to liberate women from the oppression of Islam.

For liberals, the point of return came when the Bush Administration, not to discount our brave troops, began to show progress in the war on terror. Soon, supporting the liberation of women, denial of basic human freedoms - like access to abortion and sexual diversity - began to tread dangerously close to supporting a Republican president that was using military force (gasp) to liberate an oppressed people (more gasps).

Now one of the most despotic regimes on the planet is about to be liberated from an evil dictator, and where are the liberals? They are signing onto some web site declaring "Not In Our Name". For the uninitiated in the throws of popular liberal whims that is what all of those NION bumper stickers are about. Liberal Democrats, the ones who spend all of their time slamming the president for not being kind or compassionate enough, in an unfathomable act of political selfishness would rather leave the people of Iraq in a living hell than possibly give credence to a president who has made serious gains despite all of the obstacles set before him.

Stephen A. McDonald writes for www.bigtreenews.com.

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