cover image Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9/11

Party of Defeat: How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9/11

David Horowitz, Ben Johnson, . . Spence, $22.95 (197pp) ISBN 978-1-890626-74-7

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.)