Liberals Not Realistic About Iraq

In 1985, President Reagan dared the Democrats to send him a bill raising taxes. "Go ahead, make my day" he told them. The line, borrowed from the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact, drove the liberals crazy. They pounced on Reagan, saying he couldn't tell the difference between movies and real life. He was a former actor, after all, and was getting on in years. Senility must've set in already, they said. But who is it who tends to get their fantasies mixed up with reality?

These days, a lot of Americans get their news from Jon Stewart's Daily Show. They confuse the Saturday Night Live version of George W. Bush with the real thing. They believe that the war in Iraq cannot be won because Iraqi citizens will always prefer their fellow Middle Eastern Muslims to American soldiers - even if those fellow Muslims are Al Qaeda maniacs.

First things first: it's a bad idea to get your news from Comedy Central. That one's really self-evident, isn't it? You wouldn't get your comedy from the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, would you? No matter. Stewart has become one of the most influential people in America by pushing his half-baked leftist political views.

Meanwhile, SNL has long peddled the notion that President Bush is a moron. That's fine enough in itself; we expect comedians to exaggerate personality aspects of famous people for comic effect, and Bush's sometimes garbled syntax makes him easy to caricature. But we shouldn't confuse the caricature with the real thing. Bush has an MBA from Harvard University , something stupid people don't normally earn. And yet, what did John Kerry (whose grades at Yale were worse than Bush's) exclaim when the 2004 election results started pouring in? "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot!"

Kerry, like many of us, internalized the caricature.