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The rude awakening is already beginning among those Obama supporters who expected any real "change" from this candidate. Other than his ability to fool some with smooth talk, the political renewal into which they were inspired to invest so much "hope" has thus far manifested itself as a reemergence of a bunch of Clinton era retreads who are already laying out plans to bring back the good ol' days of liberal cronyism and chaos.

Imminent White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel offered one of the most ominous harbingers of America's future with his outrageous, abominable, and revealing statement "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." The outlandish nature of that statement should alarm all but the most blindly obedient Kool-Aid drinkers on the left (whose ranks have admittedly swelled in recent years).

Being Jewish, one might expect Emmanuel to abhor such a Reichstag-burning concept of advancing a political agenda. But any scrutiny of his past behavior as a Democrat political strategist proves this latest disgrace to be entirely consistent. Nor is he alone. In the wake of 9-11, Clinton loyalists were quick to lament not the horror and loss of thousands of innocent Americans, but the regrettable misfortune that such a catastrophic attack could not have occurred on Bill Clinton's watch instead of Bush's, thereby granting Clinton the chance to prove his greatness.

Emmanuel is indeed just such an opportunist, just as his soon-to-be boss Barack Obama. These people are, after all, the standard bearers for the Democrat Party, which for nearly a century has built its own political empire on the backs of the downtrodden. Not truly helping them, the Democrat machine has instead been diligently keeping them in just such a predicament in order to prove itself their indispensable champion and defender.

Recognizing the once-likely prospect that a United States victory in Iraq, and thus in the Terror War, would bolster American morale and national prestige (qualities that spell doom for the crippled electorate that is so essential to Democrat fortunes), the left worked overtime to undermine any moral legitimacy of the entire effort. And the success of its seditious labors cannot be denied. Examples are plentiful.

It is beyond absurd to attempt any comparison of present-day life in Iraq, as opposed to the nightmarish existence under Saddam Hussein, where rape-rooms, real torture of average citizens often for inconsequential reasons, and even genocide (as evidenced by the never-ending discovery of mass graves), characterized an existence far more horrible than anything Americans could imagine. Yet the left makes just such an assessment, and in its twisted judgment has maligned America, and not the "Butcher of Baghdad" as the real oppressor of the Iraqi people.

In response to the hundreds of thousands of murders and other outrages against basic human dignity, the left (with Obama as its sanctimonious but selective ombudsman) has promised to remove the United States presence that ended the misery and liberated the Iraqi people. Surely, the possibility of an impending Iranian insurgency and more mass graves is a small price to pay for the assurance that no wayward U.S. soldier ever again forces militant Islamist prisoners to play "dog pile" at Abu Ghraib.

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