Fooled by Patraeus the traitor

I'll admit it, he had me fooled.

Maybe it's the four gold stars and the Crayola box of decorations that adorn his military dress uniform symbolizing what he has accomplished in his 33-year career as a commissioned officer.

Or it could have been his distinguished service to our country in Kuwait, Haiti, Bosnia, and Iraq.

So I was as shocked as anyone to read the New York Times last week and come to find out that General David Petraeus is a traitor to this country.

"General Petraeus or General Betray Us?"

That was the headline of the ad run in the Times Monday by MoveOn.org.

Do you get it? You see what they did there? They used a play on words to cleverly highlight their dim-wittedness.

The MoveOn.org ad was the culmination of a weeks-long campaign by the professional bedwetters in this country and their mouthpieces like Illinois' Dick Durbin to mau-mau Petraeus and his congressional testimony before he ever provided it.

Benedict Arnold. Robert Hanssen. Aldrich Ames. General David Petraeus.

It used to be that you actually had to commit a seditious act to be cast as a traitor, at least among people who pretend to be serious about such matters.

But the Democrats are not prepared to even discuss the implications of immediate withdrawal from Iraq much less back up their everybody-out-now bloviations with their backbones.

So the misdirection play is to impugn the integrity of a military officer whose career stands as a testament to integrity and to categorically dismiss his observations and the data collected prior to its presentation. This is par for the course for a party now run by 25-year-old spoiled brats with more blogs and billionaire benefactors than brains.

MoveOn.org's ad is a wonderful microcosm of the Democrats' muddled thinking. On the one hand, they accuse Petraeus of being Mr. Rosy Scenario and "cooking the books" for the White House. In the next breath, they hiss that Petraeus "has actually said that American troops will need to stay in Iraq for as long as ten years."

(Incidentally, we're still waiting for Eisenhower to provide a timetable for complete troop withdrawal from the Korean peninsula 50 years after that conflict concluded.)

So Petraeus stands accused of presenting an unrealistic view of progress on the ground except when he's predicting a decade-long slog to political stability.

This illogic is emblematic of a party that has become one big temper tantrum.

The real betrayal of this country is being perpetrated by Democrats and their front groups who are more interested in defending a position than engaging in a quest for a solution.