The Conservative Cat

White House spokesman Tony Snow lashed out today against Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) for remarks she made during an exchange with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The discussion was about the personal cost of the Iraq War.

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Rice had the following to say after the grilling was over.

"I guess that means I don't have kids. Was that the purpose of that?" Rice said. "Well, at the time I just found it a bit confusing frankly. But in retrospect, gee, I thought single women had come further than that. That the only question is are you making good decisions because you have kids?"

The Bush Administration doesn't understand what's happening here, because it is immersed in an ocean of political correctness. To understand the real truth behind Boxer's attack, you have to think like a cat. Cats don't care about scoring points for the team. We just care about getting the job done.

Secretary Rice's status as a single woman doesn't affect her intellectual capacity at all, what it affects are her feelings. Boxer slammed Rice for not having the right feelings. The importance of feelings infests every aspect of modern liberalism. Because Bill O'Reilly hasn't lost a son in Iraq, he doesn't have the required feelings to criticize Cindy Sheehan. Pelosi's children gambit on the floor of the House was completely void of intellectual content. The invasion of Bosnia was a humanitarian enterprise, but we can't get past the suspicion that Iraq is only about the oil.

All through the 2004 election campaign, conservatives were asking why Clinton's Iraq bombing campaign to take out WMDs was the right thing while Bush's subsequent WMD assertion was a lie. Clinton, you see, has the right feelings. Even if he was wrong, he's not the sort of person to go to war for the wrong reason.

Victory in Iraq is going to require an intellectual argument. The rule of law requires an intellectual acceptance, but revenge is pure emotion. Boxer was wrong to say what she did, because she was not making an intellectual argument. The only reason this was news is that her emotional argument was politically incorrect. That's the problem.

Regardless of whether or not an emotional argument is politically incorrect, it's still wrong.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat