John Hinderaker at Power-Line today posted these Pew Poll results, noting the differences in levels of support between what he refers to as “leaders” and ordinary Americans. I think myself that, over the lifetime of the post-WWII Baby Boom generation, an unprecedented cultural cleavage has grown up between members of the aspirative, educated upper middle class, the community of fashion; and ordinary Americans, what used to be thought of as the lower middle class.

Just as it is necessary for the self esteem of most upper middle class Americans to distinguish themselves from the commonality of mankind by attending elite schools, pursuing prestigious careers, driving foreign-made luxury cars, and applying keen discrimination to every possible kind of consumer good right up to, and including, the groceries, it has also over time become increasingly vital for members of the American community of fashion to distinguish themselves politically from the other species of lesser mortals making up the general population. Just as one needs to have German or Japanese automobiles and French cheese to lead the good life, one also needs to have a European socialist (revolutionary, while at school) view of domestic policy, and an anti-American perspective on world affairs. Alas! sound judgement on the best consumables, personal ambition, and enough ability to get ahead in life these days are no guarantee of the accompanying possession of an iota of common sense.

Today’s American elite lives in a dreamworld of its own, insulated by comfort and privilege from reality, and intellectually hypnotized by its own self-constructed cultural echo-chamber playing loop tapes of the cliches of long-out-dated leftist ideology.

Seneca the Younger over at YARGB Flares Into Darkness recently could not resist quoting this one in its entirety, and neither can I:

The Liberals’ Creed
Robert Alt

We believe in the United Nations, and Kofi Annan, the maker of international legitimacy.

We believe that the UN inspections worked.
We believe that SCUD missiles fired at U.S. troops minutes after the war began don’t change anything;
We believe that 3 liters of sarin gas used against U.S. troops doesn’t change anything;
We believe that finding evidence of mustard gas doesn’t change anything.

We believe that the war in Iraq conducted by a Republican president was unjustified because it lacked UN approval;
We believe that the “military action” in Kosovo conducted by a Democratic president was justified without UN approval.

We believe that the Iraq war was unilateral.
We believe that the participation of Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Ukraine does not change the fact that the war was unilateral;
We believe that multilateralism can only be achieved with the participation of France and Germany;
We believe in multilateralism.

We believe that this war was motivated by greed and oil;
We believe that when France, Germany, and Russia opposed the war, they were motivated by principle, and not by sweetheart oil deals or Oil-For-Food kickbacks;
We believe that US oil prices are too high, and that the administration failed in its responsibility to do something about it.

We believe that the U.S. may only legitimately use force for humanitarian ends in one place if it does so in all places where aid might be needed;
We believe that the U.S. may not quell threats in places where the cost is relatively low unless it is willing to use force in places like North Korea, where the cost in lives would likely be very high;
We believe that a humanitarian action is only truly humanitarian if there are no strategic interests to muddle the altruism.

We believe that President Bush lied.
We believe that Prime Minister Blair lied.
We believe that when Hillary Clinton and Dick Gephardt voted for the war based on the same intelligence relied upon by Bush and Blair, they made reasonable decisions based on the intelligence available at the time.

We believe that the administration did not make the case for war;
We believe that the administration offered many different reasons but could not offer a coherent message explaining the need to go to war;
We believe that the administration made perfectly clear that the only reason we were going to war was because of the threat from WMDs.

We believe that there were no WMDs.
We believe that finding sarin gas is 14th page news;
We believe that if the sarin gas is old, then it really isn’t a WMD we were looking for;
We believe that it wasn’t really sarin gas;
We believe that sarin gas isn’t necessarily a WMD.

We believe that there was no terrorist connection to, or threat from, Iraq.
We believe that members of Abu Nidal in Iraq would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that al Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have committed terrorist acts if we had not invaded;
We believe that Saddam’s terrorist training camp at Salman Pak—complete with a Boeing 707 plane used for hijacking drills—did not exist or posed no real threat;
We believe that it was merely a coincidence that the pharmaceutical factory bombed by President Clinton in Sudan was using al Qaeda funds and a uniquely Iraqi formula to produce VX gas;
We believe that we are responsible for bringing terror on ourselves.

We believe that the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib is widespread and is probably the tip of the iceberg;
We believe that Abu Ghraib proves that the America’s occupation is no different than Saddam’s tyranny;
We believe that any attempt to suggest that there is a moral difference between a regime which systematically killed 300,000 people and tortured countless others and a regime which punished the acts of Abu Ghraib is illegitimate.

We believe that soldiers deliberately target women and children;
We believe that the soldiers abuse and kill Iraqis because they are racists;
We support our troops.

We believe that no one should question our statement that we “support our troops;”
We believe that the best thing that could happen for this country would be for Bush to lose in November;
We believe that the best way for Bush to lose in November is for the Iraq effort to go poorly, even if that means that more Iraqis and troops will die;
We believe that most of the troops are minorities and the poor;
We believe that when the word “heroes” is used to describe our troops, it should always be enclosed in scare quotes.

We believe in quagmire.
We believe that when fringe Iraqi groups attack hard targets and are soundly defeated with relatively low Coalition casualties, that this is inescapable evidence of crisis;
We believe that Iraq is Bush’s Vietnam.

We believe that Vietnam is the lens through which all wars should be viewed.
We believe that soldiers in Vietnam were baby killers;
We believe that John Kerry is a hero for his service in Vietnam.

We believe that because John Kerry is a hero, he necessarily has the national security expertise necessary to be commander-in-chief.
We believe that any attempt to question his national security expertise based on his voting record, including his decision to vote against a supplemental bill used to buy the soldiers body armor, is an unfair attack on the patriotism of a hero, who by virtue of this honorific has the expertise to be commander-in-chief.

We believe in the trinity: NPR, CNN, and the New York Times. We believe in Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, John Kerry, and all the DNC, and we look for President Clinton yet to come. Amen.

Jack Cashill reports in WorldNetDaily that Valerie Plame Wilson may have broken the law in May 2003, revealing her own identity, and role in the Joe Wilson Trip to Niger, to reporter Nicholas Kristof.

Wilson makes a stunning admission to Vanity Fair magazine reporter, Vick Ward, who reported it in the January 2004 edition of the magazine. It has been heretofore overlooked. The wording of the relevant paragraph needs to be repeated in full since it is clumsy enough to allow misinterpretation:

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.

If “his wife” refers not to Kristof’s wife but to Plame, which it almost assuredly does, Wilson has implicated Plame in a serious transgression. “As an employee of the CIA,” he writes in the preface to the paperback version of his book, “The Politics of Truth,” “she could have no contact with the press without prior approval.”

Christopher Hitchens observes that in the War on Islamo-Fascist Terrorism there is no safety in withdrawal: Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

Withdraw to where, exactly? When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.” There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.” But to name the powerful enemies of jihad I have just mentioned is also to spell out some of the reasons why the barbarians will—and must—be defeated. If you prefer, of course, you can be bound in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space and reduce this to the historic struggle between Lewis Libby and—was it Valerie Plame? The word “isolationist” at least used to describe something real, even “realistic.” The current exit babble is illusory and comprehends neither of the above.

America’s East Asian Allies looking at US Congressional behavior and opinion polls are naturally concluding that the US lacks both the leadership and will to win a war with China.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara has gone public, warning that the United States would lose any war with China.

“In any case, if tension between the United States and China heightens, if each side pulls the trigger, though it may not be stretched to nuclear weapons, and the wider hostilities expand, I believe America cannot win as it has a civic society that must adhere to the value of respecting lives,” Mr. Ishihara said in an address to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Ishihara said U.S. ground forces, with the exception of the Marines, are “extremely incompetent” and would be unable to stem a Chinese conventional attack. Indeed, he asserted that China would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Asian and American cities—even at the risk of a massive U.S. retaliation.

The governor said the U.S. military could not counter a wave of millions of Chinese soldiers prepared to die in any onslaught against U.S. forces. After 2,000 casualties, he said, the U.S. military would be forced to withdraw.

People living in Taiwan better hope that China is not coming to same conclusion.

Hat tip to Emmy Chang.

Judith Coburn is cheerleading for Bush’s eventual impeachment over at Moonbat Jones, in an article headlined Worse than Watergate?

The current “One-Party State” seems to preclude hope, Coburn laments. But, still, she notes:

It’s often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected….

Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers’ break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration’s unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration’s imperial modus operandi.

Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience.

We can rely on the Extreme Left to be diligent in consciousness-raising in support of its affiliated Intelligence Community members in their continuing efforts to build momentum, to fan the sparks of L’Affair Plame into a media barnfire adequate to provide the basis to overthrow an elected president.

The White House has dismissed claims that George Bush was talked out of bombing Arab television station al-Jazeera by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

And it’s really better to suppose that putting the Voice of Terrorism out of business permanently is one of those small, but important, steps in achieving victory, which the Bush Administration somehow managed to talk itself out of?

George W. Bush ought to take note that (1) he didn’t do it, and (2) the MSM raked him over the coals about it anyway. He might as well just have done it in the first place, since he was going to get attacked over it whether he did or not. There’s a moral here, folks.

and Daffyd ap Hugh has some highly pertinent suggestions. Hat tip to Paul Mirengoff at Power-Line.

My suggestion is that the Bush administration must realize that this is a terribly dangerous situation: at a time of national danger, when we are at war, the CIA has become a rogue agency, uncontrolled by any branch of the federal government. It conducts its own foreign policy; it dictates military policy (through control of the intelligence the Department of Defense needs); it has seized control of a significant portion of the powers of the elected Executive.

It’s time to fight back… and best and quickest way to do so would be for President Bush to direct Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to immediately begin Justice Department investigations of this rash of recent leaks from the CIA, including the decision to allow Joe Wilson to go public with his lying claims in the New York Times about “what [he] didn’t find” in Niger; the leak about the previously secret prison facilities for terrorists; and so forth.

Reporters should be subpoenaed; if they refuse to testify, put them in jail for contempt until they do. Use the full powers of the Patriot Act to seize records and find out who is doing the leaking. And then drop the hammer on them: prosecute them for misuse of classified information or even worse criminal violations. At the very least, get enough evidence to strip them of their security clearances… make it plain that leaking to the press to damage the administration is a career-terminating offense and might even lead to prison time.

Also, be sure to widely publicize the names of leakers as soon as you dredge them up. These people rely upon anonymity; if word gets around that whatever you tell Harry ends up in a Walter Pinkus column tomorrow, the leakers will be shunned by many of the folks who have unwittingly been helping them funnel damaging information to the mainstream leftist media.

Bush can do all of this without Congress lifting a finger. He can do it over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and he doesn’t need any votes from the Democrats.

The BBC today, in the manner of journalists and Europeans, was taking the idea of American withdrawal from Iraq proposed by Congressman Murtha seriously. J. Peter Mulhern in American Thinker properly demolishes that kind of thinking:

A victorious nation either establishes a permanent troop presence on the battlefield or it loses the fruits of victory. A win or a draw followed by retreat will always degenerate into a defeat. If there is such a thing as a law of history, this is it. Consider just the few examples from our own short history.

Two hundred and twenty years after the Revolutionary War we still have troops along the east coast of North America. A hundred and sixty years after the Mexican-American War we still have troops in the Southwest. A hundred and forty years after the Civil War we still have troops in the states of the Confederacy. Sixty years after World War II we still have troops in Germany and Japan. Fifty Years after the Korean War we still have troops guarding Seoul.

We left Cuba after occupations in 1906 and 1912 (retaining only the naval base at Guantanamo Bay). Fidel Castro is our reward. We left Europe after World War I and we got World War II. We left Vietnam after we had bought a stalemate with 50,000 lives and the result was our most humiliating defeat.

When you leave, you lose. Defeat is the only exit strategy and in this instance defeat would be catastrophic. The stakes could not be higher.

Ray McGovern, in an interview with Moonbat journal Mother Jones, states that VIPS was organized in January of 2003.

We established our group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, in January of last year. Before that several of us had been writing op-eds, and we had been giving each other sanity checks, because the conclusions we were coming up with were pretty far out — that the President and the Secretary of State were lying through their teeth.

According to McGovern, VIPS, at the time of the interview (March 2004), had 35 members consisting of retired and resigned officials from the FBI, Defense Intelligence, NSA, Army Intelligence, and the State Department, and also boasted of the existence of active members of the intelligence community working with VIPS, but “not as members.”

Why is this group of disaffected intelligence agency and state department officials trying to bring down the Bush Administration?

Because there is no English word to describe our outrage. We’ve been watching this for a year now, and we’ve published eleven memos on what the Bush administration has done. We’re just aghast at what we saw all during 2002.

We have never seen anything like this orchestrated campaign, as the Administration chose to play on America’s real suffering and trauma to sell an illegal and unnecessary war.

VIPS original steering committee included:

Raymond McGovern, Arlington

Richard Beske, San Diego, “former CIA officer”

Kathleen McGrath Christison, Santa Fe
and
William Christison, Santa Fe, resigned from VIPS 15 July 2003, over memo calling for Cheney’s resignation.

Patrick Eddington, Alexandria Sourcewatch

David MacMichael, Linden, VA

Obvious additional affiliates or allies, appearing in the 2003 Moveon.org-sponsored film, Uncovered: the Whole Truth About the Iraq War include:

David Albright

Robert Baer

Milt Bearden, former CIA station chief in Pakistan

Rand Beers more politely

David Corn

Philip Coyle

John Dean

Chas Freeman

Graham Fuller

Mel Goodman Mother Jones bio and in CounterPunch Democracy Now! interview

John Brady Kiesling

Karen Kwiatkowski

Patrick Lang

Scott Ritter

The Rt Honorable Clare Short

Stansfield Turner

The Honorable Henry Waxman

Thomas E. White also

Joe Wilson article about

Colonel Mary Ann Wright

Peter Zimmerman.

Linked via Goodman above:

Greg Thielmann

Vincent Cannistraro

Other alleged VIPS members:

Ray Close, Princeton, NJ quotes CounterPunch 10Jun03 On Fallujah30Apr04

Eugene Betit

Larry Johnson web-site

An evolving document with links being added….

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker points to an ultra-left affilliated group calling itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, frequently abbreviated as VIPS, as the behind-the-scenes allies of the MSM in fanning the flames of the Plamegate scandal. VIPS recently appeared in the Washington Post:

A group of former intelligence officers urged President Bush not to pardon anyone convicted of leaking Valerie Plame’s name to reporters and to pull security clearances of any White House officials implicated in the investigation.

Feldman notes a previous article of her own demonstrating that some of the same group of people have been conducting an anti-Bush administration campaign for a considerable period of time.

VIPS was opposing the upcoming invasion of Iraq, and predicting catastrophe, on Alexander Cockburn’s far-left CounterPunch in February of 2003:

after watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441, and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.

VIPS can be seen organized and in operation already arguing for Dick Cheney’s forced resignation over his role in pre-war intelligence assessment as far back as 14 July 2003:

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney “not guilty.” His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney’s immediate resignation.

“Exit strategy” is a defeatist’s term. The only exit strategy that matters was summed up by George M. Cohan in the song the Doughboys sang as they marched off to the Great War nine decades ago:

“And we won’t come back

Till it’s over

Over there!”