“Mixed Messages”

Tim Graham has probably found the words that turned John Green’s stomach:

My concerns about the senator is that, in the course of this campaign, I’ve been listening very carefully to what he says, and he changes positions on the war in Iraq. He changes positions on something as fundamental as what you believe in your core, in your heart of hearts, is right in Iraq. You cannot lead if you send mixed messages. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our troops. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to our allies. Mixed messages send the wrong signals to the Iraqi citizens.

I guess the truth hurts. Or at least makes you queasy, if you’re part of the liberal elite.

And speaking of the liberal elite, Victor Davis Hanson is appropriately hard on them, and Michael Ware in particular:

HH: So with this in mind…again, I stress he’s the Baghdad bureau chief of Time Magazine, at one time the most influential magazine in the West, I believe. What is the disease in the media? Where did it come from?

VDH: I think it came to be frank between the journalism schools, the academic training of a lot of the people, and this affluent, elite culture, to be frank, that comes out of the unversities on the left and right coasts, that’s divorced from the tragic view, because these people are not…they don’t open hardware stores. They don’t service cars. They’ve never worked physically with their hands. They have an idea in this international culture of the West that somehow, all of their affluence, all of their travel, all of their freedom came out of a head of Zeus, and it’s not dependent on the U.S. military, the United States role in the world. They have no appreciation for the very system that birthed and maintained them. And they’ve had this sort of sick cynicism, nihilism, skepticism, and the height of their affluence and leisure, that they don’t have any gratitude at all, which is really one of the most important human attributes. Humility to say you know, I’m very lucky to be a Westerner, and have certain freedoms. And that’s why he cannot appreciate what we’re trying to do in Iraq, because he has no appreciation of the very idea that he can jet out of Baghdad anytime he wants on a Western jet that’s going to get him safely to a Western country, where he’s going to be protected, that the people in Iraq want that same thing that he doesn’t seem to appreciate.