Pelican Parts Forums - Just who is looking unpatriotic now?

Quote:

Just who is looking unpatriotic now?
by Paul Mulshine, NJ Star-Ledger
Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The right-wingers of America are really worked up about the current international crisis. They're demanding the heads of those leftist politicians inside the Beltway who are selling out our men on the front lines.

Our soldiers in Iraq? No, our border agents in Texas, specifically Ignacio Ramos and Jose Campean. You may never have heard of them, but everyone in America worthy of the label "right-winger" has, if my e-mail is any indication.

Ramos and Campean used to patrol the border looking for drug smugglers. But then they found one. And now they're in federal prison.

The alleged smuggler? He's not only free; he's suing the United States for $5 million. He's demanding compensation for having been shot in the butt while fleeing after Ramos and Campean caught him with a truckful of marijuana.

He made it back to Mexico, but U.S. government officials gave him immunity from prosecution so he could return to the U.S. and testify against the two officers. They got terms of 11 and 12 years. Ramos was beaten recently after federal officials thoughtfully put him in with a bunch of illegal alien felons.

This has the right wing in an uproar. Right-wingers have been imploring Bush to pardon the agents, but administration spokesman Tony Snow has dismissed that proposal as "nonsensical." The ensuing flap has caused consterna tion among Bush's dwindling number of supporters on the right. How, they ask, could a conservative administration take the side of a foreign drug smuggler against American border agents?

Perhaps it's because Bush has always put the interests of foreigners first. Bush has, from the very beginning, been the most openly internationalist president since Woodrow Wilson. He's always talking about the great things he wants to do for Mexicans, Iraqis and oth ers with American tax dollars.

Back in the early days of the Iraq war, this neoconservative internationalism seemed to be eclips ing the isolationist sentiment of traditional conservatives. The seminal work in this regard was a March 2003 piece in National Review by neoconservative David Frum headlined "Unpatriotic Conservatives."

In it, Frum attacked those old- line conservatives who had warned that an open-ended "war on terror" could not possibly succeed. He quoted with disapproval Lew Rockwell, a libertarian who argued that "the War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is supposed to achieve."

Frum also attacked columnist Robert Novak for arguing that the United States should concentrate on eliminating al Qaeda rather than other Mideastern terror groups such as Hezbollah. "While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is fo cused on the destruction of Israel," Novak had written.
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