There are just a few points I review in my head whenever the urge arises to cry and give into the influence of anything the left has to say about foreign policy or international politics. Self-pity is in fact the key to their mindset. Rather than spin into such a narcissistic black hole I turn my attention instead to one or more of the following vexing facts:

• The jihadis have parasitized and warred on civilization (not just Jews and Christians, not just the West) continuously for 1400 years, before unclean infidel boots ever touched sacred Arabian soil, before Bush, and long before US soldiers invaded Afghanistan or Iraq.
• The jihadis will continue to attack even if pacifist infidels silence their neocons and disband their military.
• The jihadis have co-opted Europe and Russia and within decades will conquer them through immigration and reproduction.
• Africa is a vast social, political, environmental, and economic disaster area wracked by jihad and genocide.
• Secular socialist totalitarians in South/Central America and East Asia are not satisfied with simply producing goods for trade and feeding their people. They will continue to threaten and blackmail their more civilized neighbors.
• The nuclear and biowarfare genies are out of their bottles.

The world really is a violent and dangerous place, and it isn’t likely to change simply because pacifists wish it were not. The world’s problems weren’t caused by Bush and they’re not going to die when he does. This is what I think when accosted by self-absorbed progressives pontificating about corruption, incompetence, or lying:

WASHINGTON — Convinced this is their moment, tens of thousands marched Saturday in an anti-war demonstration linking military families, ordinary people and an icon of the Vietnam protest movement in a spirited call to get out of Iraq.

Celebrities, a half-dozen lawmakers and protesters from distant states rallied in the capital under a sunny sky, seizing an opportunity to press their cause with a Congress restive on the war and a country that has turned against the conflict.

We hear alot of complaining from leftists about divisive politics. Would that look anything like a gaggle of rich and famous movie stars spewing seditious bile to a mob, manipulating the masses with spectacle and demagogy?

Well who cares what pseudo-intellectual thespians think? After all, they’re not paid to think. What’s really scary are the petty partisan pronouncements of those elected to positions of authority. They are paid to think.

The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. John Conyers, threatened to use congressional spending power to try to stop the war. “George Bush has a habit of firing military leaders who tell him the Iraq war is failing,” he said, looking out at the masses. “He can’t fire you.” Referring to Congress, the Michigan Democrat added: “He can’t fire us.

“The founders of our country gave our Congress the power of the purse because they envisioned a scenario exactly like we find ourselves in today. Now only is it in our power, it is our obligation to stop Bush.”

Spendthrift liberals aren’t normally concerned about the cost of anything, so something else is going on. It has to do with failure. When the goal is success any sane executive would fire any underling who can see only failure, and nobody would question it. In war you can’t protest or defund your way to victory. But by undermining their country’s will and ability to fight Conyers and his anti-war cohorts are trying to ensure victory. For themselves. It’s easy. Cut off funds, Bush goes down.

One of the great mysteries of leftist psychology is how they can feel inspired by rhetoric about thwarting their country’s commander in chief in a time of war, but then bristle when others question their belief in democracy, their support for the military, or their patriotism. How can people calling for peace be so vitriolic? Who, other than their similarly conflicted angry-pacifist friends, do they think they’re fooling?

On the stage rested a coffin covered with a U.S. flag and a pair of military boots, symbolizing American war dead. On the Mall stood a large bin filled with tags bearing the names of Iraqis who have died.

It’s a mortal sin when the neocons exploit the innocent lives taken on 9/11. To merely remember them nothing but a sly attempt to whip up hate and violence. But exploiting the brave warriors who volunteered and died for their country since 9/11? That’s just fine.

There is no draft. But that doesn’t stop the anti-war zealots from adopting a new victim group: those duped into volunteering for military service in the middle of a war, apparently unaware it will be dangerous and somehow under the impression they can choose where they will be sent. The zealots brazenly hijack the voices of their ideological opposites, the military dead, by compulsively gathering disrespectful arrays of boots, coffins, or lamely constructed crosses. The point might have had some basis back when a letter from Selective Services meant an involuntary tour of Vietnam. Today it ignores the reality that our soldiers volunteer.

So the pacifist view is dim and dishonest. They want Bush to lose, they don’t care who they have to exploit or manipulate or who else will suffer to make it happen. They don’t recognize that Iraq is just one battlefield in the never-ending Jihad. They deny the Jihad is even real. They think the CIA created Al Qaeda and orchestrated 9/11. They think Muslims are radicalized by poverty and oppression. They harp on the mistakes of others but never admit any of their own.

They note the complexities of the world and ridicule black and white solutions. Except when they propose them. They are hypersensitive to consequences after the fact, not before. They blame Bush for, at best causing all the suffering in Iraq out of negligence, and at worst deliberately lying to get exactly what he wanted in spite of the suffering it would predictably cause. No blame for Saddam, the Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Saudis, Russians, Europeans, or UN. It’s all on Bush and the warmongers who support him. It’s easy to put the consequences of immediate withdrawal in the same terms. Its advocates will be entirely to blame for the ensuing bloodbath and emboldening of totalitarians, at best because they are blind, and at worst because they consider it a tolerable price to pay for setting back Bush.

A reasonable person can argue that the US is responsible for some of the world’s mess. To argue that the US is to blame for most of it is ridiculous. To advocate that we simply surrender our future to the real warmongers of the world is deranged.

In the crowd, signs recalled the November elections that defeated the Republican congressional majority in part because of Bush’s Iraq policy. “I voted for peace,” one said.

They think voting for peace will produce it. QED.