How many of us have seen some driver weave in and out of highway traffic to gain a few car lengths, causing others to swerve or jam on brakes and muttered “I hope he gets into an accident.” Then good conscience steps in and we quickly add that we don’t mean for anyone to get hurt. We just want this guy to pay for his reckless driving behavior. Hell, we’d be happy if only we could phone a cop on the spot to catch the guy. It’s human nature to want people to be taught a lesson.

We recognize the same intention in the more acceptable expressions What goes around, comes around or She got a taste of her own medicine. Though less barbaric than “I hope he gets into an accident,” those sentiments express a similar appetite for satisfaction that so-and-so got what he deserved, with the added bonus that the victim of bad behavior somehow get even. Hindus and Buddhists call it karma, a bringing upon onself inevitable results, either good or bad.

You’ll also hear this very human sentiment in popular songs about romances gone sour. Notable is the Johnny Mercer/Sadie Vimmerstedt title “I Wanna Be Around” (to pick up the pieces, when somebody breaks your heart.) That fairly benign sentiment builds to the next emotionally logical level with

And that’s when I’ll discover that revenge is sweet,
As I sit there applauding from a front row seat.

Revenge. Yeah! Comeuppance. Justice. That’s what it’s all about. It’s only human.

Which brings us to the Democrat defeatists in Congress and the country at large — Dick Durbin, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Murtha, Cindy Sheehan, Jane Fonda, George Soros, Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, The Daily Kos scribblers, The New York Times, Newsweek, academia, MSNBC, CNN and other liberal workers in the country’s mainstream media, to name the most prominent detractors of the war in Iraq.

Ground rule here — this ISN’T a post to defend the war. I’m just trying to understand why the above mentioned liberal personages, publications and programmers have been so virulent against it – after they voted for it. They’re not just against the war. They denounce it.

Many conservatives have suggested that the above mentioned liberals and their ilk are unpatriotic, an accusation that brings squeals of pig-stuck denials. They reply that dissent is patriotic. Which is true. But continuously demanding a date certain for troop pullouts when common sense suggests that telling an enemy your plans gives them a decided advantage doesn’t sound like dissent. It sounds like defeat.

It’s like publicly announcing that you’re leaving for vacation on August 12th and won’t be back for two weeks. What burglar wouldn’t wait for the 13th? Why wouldn’t insurgents just lie low, bide their time, re-group, re-arm and wait for the pullout?

Why shouldn’t we legitimately think that Harry Reid is unpatriotic for publicly declaring that the war was lost, insulting the spilt blood of the soldiers who were fighting it. Is it dissent for a government leader to say something that in our bones we feel would demoralize our troops, a function usually associated with the enemy?

Think of Coach Tom O’Brien telling the Wolfpack at halftime that the game was lost. Would that inspire the team to play harder or lose their will to fight? Again, human nature’s best friend, common sense, leads one to think the latter.

And would you describe as dissent Senator Durbin comparing our soldiers to Nazis, or Senator Kerry spreading the lie on national television that our troops were entering houses in the dead of night and terrorizing children? Or John Murtha’s defamatory assertion that our Marines intentionally killed civilians – untrue charges that are now being dismissed, by the way.

Plain common sense would suggest that these Democratic strategies and criticisms are not honorable expressions of dissent but rather counter productive behavior that seems to be disloyal, i.e., unpatriotic.

But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say that the majority leadership and their unrelentingly rabid, Koolaid-guzzling followers are as patriotic as they claim to be. It’s possible that they’re just stuck-on-stupid or lack common sense, but that’s too frightening to consider. So what could explain their behavior?

Let’s go back to the road.

You’re a Democrat, cruising along the election highway of 2000 and here comes this speeding driver zigging and zagging across lanes to get where he’s going.

Damn!

Human nature being what it is, the Democrat kind of wishes that the reckless driver gets what’s coming to him, whatever that might be. After all, the Democrat’s obeying all the laws of the road, so why shouldn’t the other guy?

At the end of the trip the Democrat learns that nothing whatsoever happened to the other guy and, most galling, he got there first. Before you! And then he has the nerve to hang around for eight years to remind you that he won the race you thought you had in your back pocket. You gotta hate that, right? Human nature being what it is, that is.

I think this explains the behavior of these Democrat critics, an unbridled, irrational, wholly human desire for that other driver to get what he deserves for getting there first and by breaking the speed limit. It’s been eight years of them anxiously hoping for that something that goes around to come around. They want karma to start kicking in.

But karma works in its own sweet time so it needs a little help, some nudging and prodding. How better to do that than a relentless campaign to undermine the driver, cut his brake line or sugar his tank before the rest of the drivers begin to think that maybe it was a good thing after all that this other guy got there first.

So I don’t think the Democrats are being unpatriotic. They’re being human. It’s just that they’re not the kind of humans I’d care to hang out with.