Lantos: As resolute as ever
By John Horgan
Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 5:52 pm in Uncategorized.
Say this for grizzled Tom Lantos: He doesn’t change, no matter how much his peers like Nancy Pelosi might squirm in private. The longtime Democrat congressman from San Mateo is an adamant hawk when it comes to the Middle East. It’s a very dangerous place, filled with peril and those who despise the democracies of the west. Lantos knows it. A devoted supporter of Israel, the native of Hungary was back on the Peninsula recently. He spent time with constituents and spoke to members of the San Mateo Rotary Club during a luncheon at Dominic’s at the Poplar Creek Golf Course. Much of what he said was not especially new, except for one firm prediction he provided for very public consumption. He declared that, in his view as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the U.S. won’t be bailing out of Iraq en masse any time soon. A quick, total withdrawal is not in the cards, he said. In fact, according to him, America will maintain a military presence in the oil-rich Middle East well into the foreseeable future “as far as the eye can see.” In other words, we are in this thing, like it or not, for the very long haul. That’s not what his local critics on the loud left want to hear. Anti-war pickets continue to parade in front of his San Mateo offices on El Camino Real. Lantos, who turns 80 early next year, has spent 27 years in the House. He is up for re-election in 2008.
[You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.]
September 2nd, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Each time a Peninsulan starts to rant to me about Lantos, I observe that his positions on major issues… from social issues to defense… are similar to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt. At least that gets the older ones to pause a moment… the younger ones barely know who FDR was, let alone how important “Cold War” Democrats in whose footsteps Lantos follows were _after_ World War II.
For example, there were many sincere believers in propaganda, agitation, and other forms of _domestic_ anti-democratic action in American government and media back then… people who sincerely believed, much as Code Pink does today, that _their_ ends justified anti-democratic means. To counteract this, Eleanor Roosevelt and other leading Democrats founded the “Americans for Democratic Action” to support elections and the rule of law. Between the ADA, Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and other “Cold War” Democrats, many of those true believers lost their jobs _before_ Joe McCarthy opened his big mouth.
To this day, most newspapers forbid their reporters to take part in overt political activity. A few years back, a large Bay Area paper with an anti-war editorial position fired one of their reporters for calling in sick to take part in an anti-war political rally. It didn’t matter whether or not they agreed with his ends… they wouldn’t agree with his means.
September 3rd, 2007 at 6:23 am
Good points. Lantos has his faults, to be sure. But, when it comes to foreign policy, he has been unstinting in his efforts to maintain a strong American presence in the world. Tough Cold War Democrats used to understand such a stance.