Winning Battles, Losing The War

After the war was over a Vietnam commander was talking to an American one. The latter said to the first, “You never once defeated us on the field of battle.” The Vietnam commander smiled. “We didn’t need to,” he replied.

For some two weeks now the liberal discussion has been endless fulmination over the Republican reaction to Obama’s stance on insurance coverage for birth control, meaning that Republicans win again. They always do, because liberals are just too stupid not to fall for the conservative tactics of delay, distraction and disrupt.

The economy in this country does seem to be taking a turn for the better, but it is far from recovered, and there are still millions and millions of people unemployed or underemployed. We should be talking about restoring those people to economic health, and we should not be talking about anything else. Republicans have nothing to offer on that front, so they want to distract us from that issue, and every time they run up some bogus “social issue” for discussion, liberals jump in with both feet and the issues that really matter get lost in the shuffle.

Nothing gets done, and liberals complain that “Republicans obstructed the process.” They did that only because liberals allowed them to do so. When conservatives start their tactics of distraction a smart and courageous liberal would stand up and say, “That is not relevant to the governance of a nation of 330 million people. Stay on a subject that matters.” That doesn’t happen because we have no liberals who are either smart or courageous.

Little minds are so determined to win arguments on minor, trivial points, that they abandon the larger issue of national governance altogether. Like the commander of the “400,” they charge headlong into the “valley of death,” determined to win each minor victory and cover themselves with glory, while the war itself is lost.