Supporting the troops by not supporting them

Strib columnist Nick Coleman is at it again. He devotes today's column in the Sunday Strib to attacking the Midwest Heroes ads one more time.

Coleman is a cynosure of the Strib's brand of liberalism. He doesn't drink the Kool-Aid, he makes the Kool-Aid.

In today's column, Coleman sets up more straw men and sets them on fire. In ColemanLand, if you hold Position A, and there is one other person on Planet Earth who disagrees with you and holds Position B, then Position A is by definition a lie and propaganda.

Coleman sets this up by sugarcoating his two previous columns.

I've written twice about the pro-war TV ads sponsored by a fat-cat conservative group based in Washington. My points were simple: 1) The ads exploit the deaths of soldiers in order to advance the political agenda that led to the unnecessary war in which they fell. And 2) The ads do NOT represent all troops and families (the mother of one fallen soldier, an opponent of the war, was coldly left out).

His two previous columns are here and here. Read through them and you might agree that Coleman left out a couple of other points he made. From the first one:

Who is paying for this pro-war propaganda?
....
"The troops do not overwhelmingly support the president in Iraq," says Rieckhoff, who notes that polls show the troops' approval sinking to the low 50 percent range. "And the CIA said there is no link between 9/11 and Iraq. They still say that.

"So this ad is simply not true."

Be warned: Despite the patriotic music, the flags and the burning Twin Towers, these ads aimed at Minnesota's heartstrings are not about supporting the troops. They are just a desperate attempt to salvage support for an unpopular president's reckless war.

We've already discussed that canard. The Bush Administration has never said that Iraq was involved with 9/11.

From the second one:

These cynical ads ignore that. They exploit the fallen and are a disservice to the troops. More than that, they are lies.

(This is also the column where Coleman trotted out another canard, and said the ads claimed M. J. Kesterson was Erik Kesterson's mother, when she is his step mother. The ads make no such claim, and we've discussed here before the lowliness of saying a step mother cannot be someone's mother.)

So, beyond just making "two simple points", Coleman attacked these ads as "lies" and "propaganda."

In this latest column then, Coleman trumpets how he was heard from veterans who are against the war.

Many soldiers, family members and veterans of past conflicts wrote to tell me they, too, object to the pro-war ads.

Fine. People are entitled to their views. But I am still unclear on how the ads are "lies" and "propaganda" when the people behind Midwest Heroes are telling their side of the story, as these people who contacted Coleman are.

One of Coleman's straw men is this:

Many others who wrote to me believe that we should be able to distinguish between supporting the troops and supporting the war. That's a notion that is assaulted by the pro-war ads, which insist that supporting the troops requires supporting the politics that led to war.

Again, Coleman is simply stating his own opinion by mischaracterizing what the ads are saying. Watch the ads for yourself. Nowhere do the ads "insist" that supporting the troops requires supporting the politics that led to war. They don't even imply it.

The ads let us hear from people who are proud of their service, proud of the service of lost loved ones, and who are saying the news in Iraq is better than what we hear from media outlets such as the one that employs Coleman.

So, I gather Coleman is saying he supports the troops in the ads, he just disagrees with the war. He supports them so much he calls them liars, and propagandists.

It is one of the worst characteristics of the anti-war Left. They don't argue by putting forth a position and arguments for it, and consequences if their argument is not followed.

No, they smear their opponents, they dismiss any opposing argument as lies.

Proverbs 14 had these people pegged a long time ago.

An honest witness does not deceive, but a false witness pours out lies.
....
The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.

And from Isaiah 5:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.

It is insidious to call an opponent's argument a lie, a priori. By doing so, the Left hopes to absolve themselves of any further debate. It is a sign of their hatred that they must mischaracterize even those troops they claim to support.

That a sizeable segment of our country is so hateful, and so vindictive, does not bode well for our country's future. We have real enemies. How will we stand up to them and protect the freedoms we have when so many ignore them and instead focus their hatred on political opponents in this country?