Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz, Ben Johnson

Synopsis

A nation divided in wartime invites its own defeat. Yet that is precisely how America is facing the global war on terror. In a brutally honest assessment, David Horowitz and Ben Johnson show that the American left, led by the Democratic Party, is waging a ferocious political war against its own government that has left our country more seriously divided than at any time since the Civil War. And the consequences could be disastrous.
In the fight against Islamic terrorists, America faces perennial questions that have become suddenly urgent: What is legitimate criticism of military policy in wartime? When does criticism cross the line and undermine the national interest? Democrats now routinely cross that line, Horowitz and Johnson show. Their candid and explosive reporting forces us to confront the consequences of these unprecedented attacks on the US war effort.
Examining the anti-war arguments of Democratic leaders like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, Party of Defeat reveals their fundamental misunderstanding of our enemy and an antipathy to the American cause going back to Vietnam. As radical Islam emerged in the 1970s, it found an ally in a left-wing establishment now thoroughly conditioned to blame America first. Our failure to confront the religious thugs who humiliated us in Iran encouraged the increasingly aggressive-and deadly-Islamist movement that eventually drew us into full-scale war.
Yet the cowardice and neglect of the Carter and Clinton years pale in comparison with the Democrats' defection from the war in Iraq-a war they first authorized then abandoned. This betrayal of our forces in the field has opened, incredibly, a domestic front in our country's fight forsurvival against an enemy fanatically devoted to our extermination.

Publishers Weekly

Horowitz collaborates with his FrontPage Magazine coeditor Johnson in a vitriolic attack on the left's "cowardly" betrayal of "the American cause," singling out the antiwar stances of John Edwards, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi for special reproach. According to the authors, "a nation divided during wartime is a nation that invites its own defeat," and they argue that through ignorance and design, Democrats have obstructed presidential policy, undermined American security and continually failed to grasp the nature of the "Islamofascist" threat. Cataloguing Democratic miscalculations from the Carter administration on, the book asserts that Carter encouraged the Iranian revolution, Clinton fatally ignored bin Laden and Bush's wiretapping program was perniciously leaked to the New York Times. Their earnest moralizing overshadows these compelling fact patterns as Horowitz and Johnson omit intellectual or historical contextualization that might ratchet down the fever pitch of their argument; sadly, this sensationalism comes at the expense of some truly effective excoriations of liberal figures-particularly a brutal and delicious takedown of Frank Rich. (Aug.)

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Biography

David Horowitz is a celebrated political convert from radicalism. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, he has won fame for relentlessly unmasking the enemies of American freedom. He is president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, where he works with Ben Johnson, managing editor of FrontPage Magazine