The War of the Hacks - it's about gaining and holding power in the Fall elections

[Woodmonkey]

The War of the Hacks


It's amazing what a few days away from this politics-obsessed town can do for one's perspective. Seen from afar, the congressional debate over the war and terrorism comes across as a Washington event designed to show that Democrats are wimps on national security and to boost Republicans as true defenders of the homeland. Or Republicans are portrayed as clueless warmongers hell-bent on sending other people's sons and daughters into battle.

In reality, the struggle on Capitol Hill is not about terrorism. It's about gaining and holding power in the fall election. And it is a disgusting sight to behold.

Only five years after a horrifying new reality crashed into America, the political parties have lost sight of the nation's interests. Now it's all about getting elected.

So what if we are doing battle with an enemy that operates without a government behind its name? So what if it's the kind of enemy that boards an airplane containing schoolchildren and their teachers, mothers holding toddlers by the hand and other innocent civilians minding their own business? So what if it sets out to kill because the intended victims have the bad grace to live in America?

Unless I'm mistaken, the Sept. 11 hijackers didn't ask the doomed passengers if they were Democrats or Republicans. They didn't care one bit if the people strapped in their seats for takeoff were liberals, conservatives or neocons.

They made no politically correct announcements allowing women, children and people of color to leave the aircraft before the flight attendants closed the doors.

The fanatics who took the innocent to their deaths set their eyes on those three 11-year-old D.C. public school students, Rodney Dickens, Bernard Brown and Asia Cottom, and on 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg and 8-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, as they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles.

They couldn't have missed seeing 3-year-old David Brandhorst, 2-year-old Christine Hanson and 4-year-old Juliana Valentine McCourt, who boarded United Airlines Flight 175 with their families in Boston. The enemy that day couldn't have cared less about the innocent passengers on the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the ground in Pennsylvania.

Self-regarding members of Congress, intent on keeping their jobs, have forgotten all about enemies who are so convinced of America's evil and their own righteousness that they can justify making everything in this country -- its national treasures and its people -- targets for destruction.

Listen closely to the huffing and puffing on Capitol Hill. It's all about criticizing each other on the war. They work themselves into a lather arguing about which party can best represent Americans in the hallowed halls of Washington. Watch as they strut and brag about how their party is, because of a surfeit of patriotic zeal, best able to hold terrorist-harboring countries accountable.

Each party treats the other like a malignancy on the body politic when the real cancer is the terrorists whose malignant objective is to kill and maim, to show us how vulnerable we are, to instill fear and to bring this country to its knees.

So, while members of Congress slip, slide, peep and hide in their quest for cheap political advantage, somewhere, somehow, a group not unlike those who got to us five years ago is plotting against crowded suburban shopping malls, downtown cultural centers, subway stations, football stadiums and sources of drinking water.

Their targets of opportunity are endless. So are their potential victims. That is what makes the Osama bin Ladens of this world true global menaces whom Congress and the White House ought to be joining forces to combat.

Five years after Sept. 11, the focus of Republicans and Democrats has shifted from the enemy to each other. But the forces that killed nearly 3,000 people in America still consider their enemy to be those of us who call America home. And the enemy targets this nation in the true spirit of equal opportunity -- without regard to race, creed, age, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or religion.

Congress and the White House ought to be focusing on defeating that enemy -- not each other. The puerile political nonsense on display on both sides of the Capitol dome must end.

Al-Qaeda, as has been written in this space, bleeds, too. The terrorist ilk that attacked on Sept. 11 must be broken -- not chased, harassed or condemned from a U.N. podium, but broken. That means: Take them down here, there or anywhere they're found.

Bring them before the bar of justice if possible, but by all means, and for as long as it takes, hunt them down. To do any less is to invite more strikes, more body bags, more shattered American lives.

I was looking forward to the day when I could tell my four grandsons and my granddaughter about wars that never came to our shores.

Now they have something to tell me, and not out of their young imaginations. As I noted in a column shortly after Sept. 11, the mother of one of my grandsons' classmates worked at the World Trade Center. Another playmate's father was among the second wave of firefighters to enter the towers.

My grandchildren understand war in a way that I never did at their ages.

Members of Congress, absorbed during a time of war in saving their own political skins, should be ashamed of themselves.

The Source