The Defining Moment of the Antiwar Faction

Peter Feaver, in yesterday's Boston Globe, compared MoveOn.org's attempt to inpugn General David Petraeus to that of Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy started his downhill slide to self-destruction after Army lawyer Joseph Welch challenged him, saying:

You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

That's exactly what we should be saying to MoveOn.org after the publication of their advertisment attacking Petraeus' credibility:

The MoveOn.org ad is vicious, and would garner comment even if it were merely one more primal scream in the coarse blogosphere debate over Iraq. But it is not an angry e-mail or blog entry. It is a deliberate attack on the senior Army commander, in a major daily newspaper, with the intention of destroying as much of his credibility as possible so that his military advice could be more easily rejected by antiwar members of Congress.

The attack was part of an elaborate effort to undermine public support for the Iraq war, and was foreshadowed by an unnamed Democratic senator who told a reporter, "No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV . . . The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us." The effort is funded by powerful special interests, and has all the trappings of a major political campaign.

Precisely because it is so vicious, so public, and so deliberate, the attack on Petraeus cannot be ignored by either side in the Iraq debate.

Feaver perfectly captures my feelings on MoveOn's underhanded attacks, not to mention the hard left's entire antiwar smear campaign on the Bush administration's surge strategy.

This is the "defining moment of the antiwar faction," notes Feaver.

Let me stress Feaver's key point: It's vital for clear-headed thinkers to rebut these attacks. I will continue to speak out against such despicable smear campaigns, and I urge my readers to pick up attention to these attacks in their work.

Click here for the Washington Post's photo image of MoveOn's New York Times attack ad.

For a printable PDF version of the ad, check this post over at Hoystory.