Harry Reid gets early start on rewriting history

One of the early things that caused me to rethink Progressivism was the post-Cold War claim that everyone in the West was dedicated to winning it. It was plainly untrue and astonishing given Ex-President Jimmy Carter's (D) publicly stated sentiments that we should get used to the Soviet Empire, or that generations of Americans – including Pinch Sulzberger, the current publisher of the New York Times – actively and unapologetically rooted for America's defeat in Viet Nam.

Everyone may have been relieved that the Cold War was over, but it was a bald faced lie that "politics stopped at the water's edge," or that Progressives as a whole were happy with who won.

There may have been solidarity under Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy (if you ignore all the Progressives in those administrations whose beliefs encouraged them to help the Soviets acquire military and state secrets). But it has not been true since. The cult of Guevara found an easy home in The Obama's campaign offices.

While President Reagan was being praised and blessed in Eastern Europe for calling the Soviets The Evil Empire, Western European and American Progressives were vilifying him for being stupid. They called him evil, just as Progressives today expend all their hate and rage at Bush. "Regime change begins at home" says the bumper sticker on the Volvo.

This ex-post claim of solidarity in the face of leftist tyranny was troublesome because it was obviously untrue, and it concerned the single most important issue of the second half (if not the first) of the 20th century.

It was a Big Lie.

If Progressive leaders and thought leaders would be so unscrupulous as to lie so openly about something so obvious, it was clear that the real stories about a lot of things probably weren't being told.

Now Harry Reid, whose behavior during the Iraq Campaign was despicable if not treasonous (yes, treasonous) claims that his actions were really just some kind of Jedi mind trick to goad the idiot McHalliBusHitler administration into the surge.

Despite the fact that we know he openly opposed it while it was in progress. 

When the administration pushed hard for early elections in Iraq, Progressives whined that it was too early to do so, that it was a distraction from the realities of the fighting on the ground. But the administration and the military knew that it was all part of the process. From early on, our good men and women out there were working with the Iraqi people to bolster and improve the social sphere. The contractors whose bodies were burned and hanged on bridges were there to help repair the infrastructure that was destroyed by the invasion and decades of neglect by the Hussein regime.

In other words, "the non-military solution" was being worked out from the very beginning.

What Reid and other Progressives are counting on is the mistaken belief that the Bush administration's only tool in Iraq was the gun, when in fact the gavel and the plumber's wrench also played important roles.

Sometimes history has to be rewritten because new facts have come to light. Sometimes it has to be rewritten because those who wrote it were pushing an agenda. Arthur Schlesinger's work on the Great Depression comes to mind. But those who rewrite history often do so because they were on the wrong side of it.

It's cowardice of the worst sort – only one's pride is at stake – and it's a betrayal to future generations who should be told the truth whenever the truth is known, so that they don't repeat the awful mistakes made by the rest of us.

If one actually believed in Progress, one would hate this sort of thing.