Tuesday October 07, 2003

MEME-ORIES LIGHT THE CORNER OF MY MIND. The golden days of the Fifth Column seemed to have passed. Things had been quiet along the traitor-baiting front, and conservatives had been content to portray liberals as, say, sex-fiends or as sissies, rather than as enemies of the state.

Now Bob Bartley comes running out of the woods hollering Hoo-ah! Let's do it again!:

...having won overwhelming public support, [Bush]now faces home-front guerrilla assaults as well.

The latter problem is the serious one. With press coverage starting to balance the good news and the bad, we're coming to understand that on the ground in Iraq the guerrillas are isolated. The Baathist remnants and Arab militants have nothing like the external sanctuary and superpower support that sustained the North Vietnamese and anti-Soviet Afghans. For the moment terrorists can still ambush Americans and assassinate pro-peace Iraqi leaders, but exhausting them is only a matter of time and patience.

Which of course is where the home-front guerrillas come in.

I think I may have heard a couple of other guys saying that liberals were giving aid and comfort to the enemy by saying mean things about Bush, but at the time I thought it was flashbacks. Can the eminence gris of Opinion Journal guide wingers back onto this particular warpath? I'll be watching with interest, and my passport handy.