Cross-comment: Does the Left “Hate” America?

Through the Daou Report, I wandered (against my better judgment) over to Dr. Sanity to read the post “Go Wide Mr. President“. Then I read the comments and I was shocked to see something I actually agreed with, posted by someone named GnuCarSmell replying to someone named Garry:

You have it exactly right. It is literally impossible for the jihadists to defeat America in Iraq (or anywhere else) and they know it. It is possible, however, for us to surrender. An American defeat can only be self-inflicted.

Totally. We can only lose in the struggle against terrorism if we surrender… if we surrender our history, if we surrender our decency, if we surrender our fundamental rights and our habits of freedom. We can lose only if we parlay a losing war of choice (launched under false pretenses) into an epic struggle of us against everyone. We can lose only if we give up our history of tolerance and tradition of fair play.

If Iraq is “the central front in the war on terror”, it is only because President Bush made it so. And if we are losing, it is only because he and his cronies completely flubbed the war they chose. The left doesn’t “hate America”. We hate seeing America made over into less than it should be, we hate seeing American soldiers squandering their lives on a war we didn’t have to fight and which our “leaders” chose to fight poorly. We hate seeing the future of our country, in a genuinely dangerous century, being decided by ideologues with willful blinders on, people who can’t “go wide” because they can’t see the imbraglio they caused without reason or justification.

Hate America? If we hated America, we’d be cheering on the Rabid Right as it paves our way to destruction…