Samuel Johnson famously said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and he was right ——— in 1775. But that was long before the rise of the Left. Today, patriotism is treated with contempt. If Dr. Johnson were alive today, he would see pacifism as the last resort of scoundrels.

The Cindy Sheehan soap opera near President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, was a classic example of agitprop — Lenin's term for "agitation and propaganda," that still provides the basic playbook for the Left. The intellectual substance of the Cindy drama is near zilch — a grieving mother who translates her rage into a political stunt, to the delighted cheers of our mainstream media. For every Cindy Sheehan there are untold thousands of mothers and fathers who have not chosen display their pain in public, or to use it for political ends. There is nothing in Mrs. Sheehan's words that cannot be found in Michael Moore. It is pure propaganda.

Ever since Marx and Lenin, the Left has had a monopoly on "peace" — if one defines "peace" as the extermination of the bourgeoisie and the spread of Gulags to the whole world. But by those standards Osama Bin Laden is also a pacifist. After all, to Bin Laden and his gang, the lands of Sharia are "Dharb al Salam" — "the house of peace" — in which homosexuals deserve public execution, family honor requires women to be stabbed to death for flirting, and Christians and Jews are subjected to a life of degradation, if they are allowed to live at all.

I must admit they had me fooled. After years of watching peace marches on TV I just assumed that people on the Left were actually marching for peace.
Ten years ago an aging Berkeley radical told me he was never a pacifist. His "pacifism" was quite selective, like Lenin's. He was a Pacifraud, and so are Cindy Sheehan's supporters. Pacifrauds forgot to march in the streets when President Clinton bombed Serbian civilians from 15,000 feet in order to "liberate" Kosovo. We now know that hundreds of ancient churches have been burned down in Kosovo since its "liberation," and replaced by mosques.
Kosovo is now Dharb al Salam, a house of peace. It is a great success story. Just ask Bill Clinton.

Honest pacifists are rare. After all, to be an honest pacifist one must be either a saint, or in deep denial of the world as it is. Take the two most celebrated pacifists of the last century, Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi. No doubt Einstein and Gandhi  wanted  peace. So do we all. But it was Einstein who told FDR about the atom bomb, and thereby set into motion the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki several years later. And it was Gandhi who mobilized Western opinion to throw the British Raj out of India, at the cost of 4 million lives during the chaotic Partition of 1948. As peace makers, Einstein and Gandhi were stupendous failures.  If causing four million deaths is not a failure, what is?

Some years after Hiroshima, Albert Einstein wrote to a Japanese physicist that

"I didn't write that I was an absolute pacifist but that I have always been a convinced pacifist. That means there are circumstances in which in my opinion it is necessary to use force."

"Such a case would be when I face an opponent whose unconditional aim is to destroy me and my people."

The fact is that Einstein was simply confronted with a stark reality. He fled  Germany in 1933, after seeing the Nazis come to power. He could not longer deny Hitler's plain intentions. The real world does present painful choices, as it does today. Honestly facing such choices is called "adulthood." The Pacifraud Left is therefore in endless denial of adulthood and reality.

In Samuel Johnson's time political demagogues used the rhetoric of patriotism.  Today, pacifism attracts scoundrels because they can use the rhetoric of peace to fool the gullible.  But Pacifraud is not just a lesson in the gullibility of human beings. It is much more dangerous. The public pretense that any decent person must be a pacifist makes it impossible for us to tell the truth about the world, and about the real choices we face as a country.

In the last hundred years we have always been faced with deadly enemies to our very existence: Nazism, Marxism, and Islamofascism. We are therefore  always confronted with Einstein's choice. Do we tell FDR about the Bomb, or let Hitler win? Do we fight and lose precious American lives in Iraq, or maybe have to battle a stronger Saddam later on?

On this very day we face the question whether the crazies in Iran will get their own Bomb. It is the most urgent questions of our day, but our brain—washed media keep us from even thinking about it.

Adults have to face those questions.

Contrary to the mythagogues of the Left, our dilemma, like Einstein's,  is never "War versus Peace." It is always "What kind of war?" "What kind of peace?"

Even if we do our utmost to make perfect decisions, our knowledge is always incomplete. FDR made mistakes, Truman did, Gandhi did, Einstein did.  They just realized that doing nothing is also a decision. People can die when we do nothing ——— as in the  Holocaust, the Gulag, World War II.

Welcome to the real world, Cindy. Leave the Pacifrauds behind, and, if you are an adult with a conscience, make a heartfelt apology to President Bush and your fellow citizens.