How much longer will we be celebrating Independence Day?

It’s almost Independence Day. The most patriotic day of the year, and to help the American people celebrate, Congressional Democrats are once again trying to push forth legislation to raise the white flag in Iraq. Nothing helps commemorate the birth of our nation and the sacrifices made by our forefathers quite like the idea of running and hiding.

(Politico.com) — Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) are expected tomorrow to announce a new coordinated effort to force votes in July to end the Iraq war, according to Democratic insiders.

Reid has already publicly declared that Senate Democrats will offer four Iraq-related amendments to the upcoming 2008 Defense authorization bill, including a proposal by Reid and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) to set a firm timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by next spring.

Pelosi is planning to announce that the House will also vote on a bill setting a new withdrawal timetable of April 1, 2008, although the details of the proposal were still up in the air at press time, according to Democratic sources. The House will consider this proposal as a freestanding bill, said the sources.

(For the full article from Politico.com, which is referenced throughout, click here.)

I don’t know how you celebrate the Fourth of July. Maybe it’s with a picnic, maybe it’s with fireworks. I hope you spend it with family and friends. Most of all though, I hope you take time to say a quick prayer of thanks to God for giving us this great land of freedom. I also hope you take time this next week to remember the sacrifices of our founding fathers, and of our veterans.

Many of us will never know first hand the pain and suffering that some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence went through. Nor will we know the true sacrifice soldiers who gave their lives storming the beaches of Normandy gave. What of our men who faced unspeakable horrors in the jungles of Vietnam? Lest we not forget our men and women at war right now in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere fighting against radical Islam. May God bless them and their families.

We’ve always been a country of bravery fighting for our freedom, and democracy in the world. So it is with great disgust that I write this letter seeing the leaders of Congress ready to back down from the greatest fight of our generation. The issue is not the strategy in Iraq with these folks. They may want you to think they’re just upset with the way Iraq has gone. The truth is they don’t want us to fight at all. They want us to lay down our arms. In a perfect world, that sounds pretty good doesn’t it? The problem is we do not live in a perfect world.

We live in a world with real evil forces at work. We live in a world where radical followers of Allah and Mohammad are strapping bombs to their children in order to kill people. There is no room to tolerate that behavior. These terrorists kill without a second thought, and the strategy of appeasement and political correctness only emboldens them. You cannot reason with a mad man or in this case mad men. We did not choose this fight, but history will judge us on how we react to this menace. If we do not see this fight through, the fight will not go away. Ask the people in Great Britain, Spain, France, African countries like Sudan, Russia, and last but not least Israel. Do you want the chaos of Iraq fought on the streets of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities within our great nation?

(Politico.com) — In addition, House Democrats will push proposals to prohibit the creation of permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, as well as a “readiness” initiative similar to that authored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). The Webb proposal would limit deployments of U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraq by requiring the Pentagon to keep military units from being sent back to Iraq until they have been stateside as long as they were in the combat zone.

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the powerful Defense subcommittee on the House Appropriations Committee and a leader of the anti-war movement, is planning to offer his own new measures as part of the Defense spending bill.

The left thinks that by ending the war in Iraq we will be saving the lives of our troops. While that may be true in the short term, how many more troops and American citizens will be lost when the battle comes closer to home? The insane notion that some Democrats would have us not even have a military presence in the middle east shows how little they think of the sacrifices already made by our men and women in the War on Terror.

(Politico.com) — Both Pelosi and Reid have come to the conclusion that President Bush’s plan for a “surge” in the number of U.S. troops inside Iraq, has failed and that Democrats, despite losing their showdown with Bush and the Republicans over the recent Iraq supplemental funding bill, must continue to force votes to end the war. Gen. David Petraeus is supposed to report back to Congress in September on the state of the “surge,” but Democrats have decided not to wait for his report.

“The surge is a failure, it isn’t working,” said a Democratic aide familiar with the new initiative. “We just can’t leave American soldiers out there dying and not do anything.”

One of the unfortunate truths of war is the fact that there is death. I don’t know if that is a truth that Democrats are aware of, or just choose to completely deny. I also don’t know if this attitude is a product of the “instant gratification” culture in which we live, or if some on the left just live in an alternate state of reality brought on by too many hallucinogenic drugs.

How long as “The Surge Strategy” been in place? Six months? They can’t even wait for the official report back to Congress to weigh evidence and make a decision. They’ve already made up their minds. Worse yet, they’re not just ready to abandon this strategy, but they do not have another strategy to put in its place. Instead of coming up with alternatives, they’ve done nothing but sit back, and eagerly watch and root for the United States military to fail. I am literally sick to my stomach and you should be too.

My prayer is that the American people would realize that this fight is bigger than an opinion of President Bush. This fight is bigger than Republicans and Democrats. This fight is bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan. This fight is a fight for democracy and freedom which faces a very real and very powerful evil: radical Islam, which seeks to murder, destroy, and enslave the free world as we know it.