I sure wish I had gone to college instead of running off to be a wandering hippie! I guess its too late to regret the mistakes of our troubled youth but when complicated stuff comes up in the news sometimes I get confused. For instance, if keeping the misunderstood 'militants' who were arbitrarily seized for no reason by the Evil Bush Regime and kept in air-conditioned luxury in Club Gitmo is a horrendous torture-scene that disgraces our nation before the world than how come the same people who have been sniveling for years for these paragons to get 'their rights' are saying that John McCain being held in a dungeon for five years and brutally tortured without any restraint is no big deal? Hell, anybody can go through five years of torture, cant they? Except Muslims, of course, we all know how wrong that is.
The problem with McCain and also with the poor wretches who have had the misfortune of falling into the hands of Al-Qaida in Iraq and been tortured and mutilated before they were decapitated is that they were on the wrong side of the issue than the truly patriotic lefties.
And what a wonderful record of service to our nation the Left Wing has had! Lets trip down memory lane and review the noble stance taken by the left for the last century.

The Russian Revolution-- While Lenin and the gang were causing mass starvation with their economic policies during the Russian Civil War which followed WW1 the left loudly yelled for an end to foriegn intervention and against any aid to the White armies. Lincoln Stephens visited Moscow at the height of the bloodbath and pronounced, "I've seen the future and it works!"

The War Against The Kulaks-- Lenin had backed off from the worst excesses of 'War Communism' but in the early 1930s Stalin reinstated them with a vengeance...to the applause of the New York Times whose correspondent commented about the millions of deaths and tens of millions led off to slavery in death camps, "You cant make an omelet without breaking eggs!" Roosevelt sent an Ambassador, Joseph Davies, who was paid off in artwork and cash and who denied anything untoward was happening. George Bernard Shaw, Will Rogers and a host of other prominent artists and thinkers sang Stalin's praises.

The Spanish Civil War-- Support was strong in the American Left for the 'Loyalists' who were executing priests and nuns and confiscating private property. The bloody purge of the non-Stalinist loyalists in Barcelona was ignored and commies like Picasso and Hemingway covered up the vile nature of the loyalist side with glowing works of art. If the loyalists had won Spain would be like Bulgaria today.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact-- The true founding of The Peace Movement dates from August 26, 1939 when the anti-facists became loud advocates of PEACE! The left in this country became loud opponents of any aid to beleaguered Britain and were so influential with FDR that he sent an Ambassador to the UK (Joseph Kennedy) who was a notorious Anglophobe and who was sent home in disgrace for his pro-Hitler remarks during the Blitz. Any Jews who couldnt swallow the alliance between Stalin and Hitler were dumped from the ranks of the faithful and never allowed back.

WW2-- The Peace Movement turned into a ferocious War Movement on June 22, 1941- the day Hitler attacked his ally Stalin. They advocated giving Stalin free the equipment we were charging the Brits for under Lend-Lease. They vilified Chaing Kai Chek in China who was fighting the Japanese and the Communists and praised Mao and the Communists who were collaborating with the Japanese and fighting Chaing. As the war in Europe drew to a close FDR, under the tuteledge of 'advisors' like Alger Hiss (a Soviet agent prominent in photos taken with FDR at Yalta) was encouraged to think of British colonialism as a greater threat than Soviet Communism. The agreements reached at Yalta turned half of Europe over to Stalin. Stalinist toadies in the British government 'repatriated' millions of slave laborers who had been transported the to the West by the Nazis and who were terrified of returning to their Socialist Motherland over to Stalin's NKVD for arrest and disposal.

The Cold War-- During the Cold War the left enthusiastically supported every Communist rebel, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega and Patrice Lamumba are examples, and opposed US policy at every turn. "They're just like us!" became the cry. Dunces like Henry Wallace led movements against the strong policies of Truman. Many of the leaders of the left at this time were later found to be in the pay or under the influence of the Soviet Union when Yeltsin opened the KGB files in the nineties.

Viet Nam-- I was a member of The Peace Movement. We smugly yelled the lies of the moment and slogans from the Red Book and self-righteously marched against a war we knew in our hearts was just US Imperialism oppressing a poor nation which just wanted to cast off its chains. The media overcovered botches like My Lai, where a platoon of US soldiers went crazy and killed a hundred or so Viet civilians and never reported atrocities like Hue, where the VC entered the city during the Tet offensive with lists of those to be executed. More than 2000 were slaughtered and dumped into a mass grave. Similar actions happened all over the country to deafening silence. The American media, led by the Sniveler-in-chief Whiner Cronkite announced that the Tet Offensive was a major communist victory, even though they had been pounded into the ground and lost well over half their army within two weeks. When Nixon 'Vietnamized' the war, withdrawing US troops and finally lifted the restraints against bombing Haiphong and mining the harbor the Paris Peace Treaty was signed. Once Nixon was deposed by the left the North Vietnamese Army crossed the border and enslaved Indochina to the joy and Hosannahs of the American Left who yelled ,"Peace At Last!"
"Its the kind of peace I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy," said Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As the wave of tiny boats crossed the South China Sea fleeing from Peace At Last and even the Washington Post could no longer lie about the bloodbath cooked up by the Sorbonne graduates running Cambodia the left sneered and turned its back on Indochina and left it to its misery.

Africa-- After Vietnam regime after regime in Africa fell to Marxist governments. Countries like Guinea and Equatorial Guinea lost a third of their populations as people fled or were murdered. In Ethiopia a man-made famine in Tigre and Gondar provinces by the Marxist regime was responded to in the West by a 'We Are The World' campaign, which raised a billion dollars and handed it over to the Marxists who had perpetrated the massacre in the first place.
Carter's UN Ambassador Andrew Young called the poison-gas using Cuban and Russian troops in the Horn Of Africa 'a stabilizing influence'.

Afghanistan-- Jimmy Carter, a left-wing president announced that he had gotten over his 'inordinate fear of communism' just as the Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. The weak and sympathetic Carter responded by having the US boycott the Olympics in Moscow that year.
Later, when Reagan began aiding the Mujaheddin rebels the left, mainly in Congress, opposed him at every turn.

Central America-- Gorbachev's gambit to impose communist governments in Central America was met with tears of joy in the American Left. Gangs of beaded and sandal-wearing hippies went down to help the Sandanistas in Nicaragua help defeat the hated Reagan. The press and the Congress went insane when they found out that Reagan had violated the provisions of an appropriations bill which forbade aid to the Contra forces opposing the Cubans and their puppets and ginned up a Watergate like show trial entitled 'Iran-Contra' where they were going to tear down the Reagan Administration like they had done with Nixon. They were stopped in their tracks by the testimony of Oliver North, who proudly and effectively made the case that it was in our national interest to defend ourselves from Communist aggression in Central America.

The Middle East-- as the Palestinian cause became more trendy and unabashedly Marxist the left abandoned its brief liking of Israel and moved increasingly towards sympathy with Al Fatah. Loonies like Vanessa Redgrave were filmed dancing with gangs of AK-47 toting terrorists. Nutballs like Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson and the lovely Rev Wright of Chicago toured the Middle East smooching the sandals of Qaddaffi and Hafez Al Assad. terrorism was explained as a natural response by the oppressed to their oppressors. Israel was chided at every turn to stop responding to attacks and to return territory seized in the Six Day War to its sworn enemies without preconditions. When Sharon built a security fence (which stopped the endless terror attacks) the howls from the left were deafening.

The Gulf War-- Ever since Carter had encouraged Saddam Hussien to attack Iran, touching off a bloody eight-year-long war, the left had been ignoring Iraq's use of Soviet-supplied chemical weapons. When Reagan was forced to use the US Navy to prevent an Iranian victory the left instantly crowed that Saddam was somehow a US puppet. A year later, when Saddam attacked a US ally, Kuwait, the left chanted 'No Blood For Oil' and opposed going to war to reverse the conquest. In a 'TV time for oil' deal the vote of a key Senator, Algore, was purchased by the Bush I administration and Saddam was pushed back into Iraq. The Saudis and the peaceniks stepped in to prevent the weakling Bush from moving in for the kill, leaving Saddam's Baghdad a pleasant stopover for politicians like Jim McDermott and weirdos like Sean Penn.

The War On Terror-- Before and since the attack on 9/11 the left has opposed every action, leaked every secret they could get their hands on and has developed a love and affection for a group of renegade Muslims who are considered far too extreme by regular Muslims. Politicians like Jack Murtha have loudly accused our troops of murder before any investigation took place and these charges have been picked up by the terrorist media. The fraternity pranks of a few renegade guards at Abu Graib were reported in the left-wing press for over a year while our own troops' torture and mutilation by Al Qaida were ignored. When our forces finally began to triumph we have heard from loathsome creeps like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean that it was all a lie, of course we're losing! Terrorists and officials of governments who sponsor and support terrorism are invited to speak on university campuses to fulsome applause while conservative speakers are ejected from the podiums by violent mobs. The Democratic nominee has announced that in the future terrorist attacks will be met with subpoenas and indictments. He proudly pointed to the first World Trade Center bombing, where the main instigator, Khalid Sheik Muhammad was left untouched to plan a redo.

So you see, the left has a century-long war record it can be proud of! It has opposed reactionary US policy at every turn and sometimes succeeded. So when someone tries to tell you that some colonialist like McCain, who could have been working for the Progressive Forces but instead sat in his cell helping the Imperialists, should be proud of his war record you can laugh and say, "The PEOPLE know best!"