Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Peters, Charles

Above it all

Howard Dean's "guys with confederate flags on their pickups" is the latest in the long series of similar statements by liberal Democrats that demonstrate their desire to be superior. Dean was right in wanting to reach out to the guys, but wrong to characterize them in a way that John Edwards correctly described as "condescending." I believe this desire to be above other people took political root in the Adlai Stevenson era.

Too many liberals were for Stevenson not because he had proved he had more talent for governing than Eisenhower but because he was more intellectually sophisticated, and they were proving that they were too. From there we went on to "cops are pigs," "let those hillbillies go get shot," and "I loathe the military," and we were off and running.

The increasing prosperity of the educated elite has removed them further from the concerns of the average man, as have their failure to serve in the military, their growing tendency to send their children to private schools, and, above all, their disdain for religion.

Speechless

The scene: a House Select Intelligence Committee hearing. The date: November 5, 2003. The witnesses: officials from the CIA and other national security agencies. The questioner: Rep. Rush Holt. The question: [after describing several examples of the military and intelligence agencies' "too-few-translators" problem, including the Special Forces hunting Osama bin Laden without knowing the local language] "Is anything being done to increase the pool of language speakers from which the military and intelligence agencies can recruit?" The answer: Not a single witness could name anything that is currently being done to increase the pool.

Admiring Cher

I never thought of myself as a fan of Cher's, but I am one now. A few weeks ago, she called CSPAN's "Washington Journal" to describe the wounded soldiers, including a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both arms, that she had seen while visiting the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She criticized the news media for not giving enough coverage to the wounded. She also asked "why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the President--why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I don't understand why are these guys so hidden and why there aren't pictures of them."

Coverage of the wounded has gotten a bit better since its total absence was noted here in our September issue. Not only did The Washington Post do a major story, noted here in October, so have The Wall Street Journal and Time. And The New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller has wondered why Bush doesn't visit the wounded. (Of course, this front-page story probably will mean that Bush will pay the wounded a visit before this magazine appears. But that will not alter the fact that he went more than half a year without doing so.)

Time's Nov. 10 article by Mark Thompson reported that 1,513 had been wounded seriously enough to be flown back to this country, adding: "The most seriously wounded are flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, usually on night-time flights." Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) observes, "The wounded are brought back at midnight, making sure the press does not see." (See the interesting letter by Patricia Koster on p. 3).

"People in the United States do not appreciate what's going on here," Col. Doug Liening, commander of the 21st Combat Support Hospital in Iraq, tells The Wall Street Journals Yaroslav Trofimov. "It's like a horror movie," adds Capt. Nancy Emma, "I worked in a trauma unit [in the U.S.], [ saw death in the face--but nothing like here. And those who live, you've got to wonder how they're going to make it back in the States."

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