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Lopez: You write of Democrats on Iraq: “It was almost as if they were rooting for America’s defeat.” Is that fair or right? To say that because they (now) disagree with the president on Iraq, they’re “rooting for America’s defeat”? Maybe they just want to get us out before there is an inevitable defeat?

limbaugh: I say “almost” because even I have difficulty believing one of the two major political parties actually behaves the way it does in constantly working against our nation at war. But rather than getting bogged down in whether liberals are “unpatriotic,” I would prefer to examine their conduct and statements concerning the war effort and President Bush — our commander in chief. I address this question in my book, showing how Democrats downplay every bit of good news in Iraq and exaggerate the bad news. They couldn’t even bring themselves to rejoice when millions of Iraqis went to the polls in January 2005 to formalize a transitional government, or when, in elections later that year to ratify the constitution, Iraqis voted at great personal risk to themselves and their families. Indeed, the Democratic leadership viewed that demonstrable success as a partisan defeat. Nancy Pelosi actually convened her “troops” to figure out how to respond to this watershed event, as if it was some kind of setback for the Democratic party of the United States. What does that tell you about the party’s mindset?

In addition, the party opposes President Bush every step in the way in the war on terror, from opposing the NSA surveillance program and mischaracterizing it as “domestic” spying, to opposing extension of the Patriot Act, to exaggerating isolated cases of prisoner abuse at Gitmo and mislabeling them “torture,” to opposing the tracking of terrorists’ finances and phone database records. The party reflexively sides with the United Nations and the nations of Old Europe, who wrongfully and shamefully oppose our effort in Iraq. The Democrats routinely understate the nature and scope of the terrorist threat, preferring to treat it more as a law enforcement issue than a war, and seeing it as a narrow and small enemy led by Osama bin Laden rather than a global band of international terrorists sponsored by a host of nation states. They say we have caused terrorists to hate us and to war against us by attacking Iraq, conveniently forgetting that “shock and awe” in Baghdad postdated 9/11 by almost two years. The party’s ex-presidents and ex-vice presidents gleefully denounce America on foreign soil, and the party elevates radicals like the antiwar Howard Dean to leadership positions and glorifies antiwar loons like Michael Moore. They seem opposed to American exceptionalism and genuinely do possess a blame-America-first mentality, as clichéd as that might sound. The worst thing they’ve done, as already noted, is to tell the world for three years running that our commander in chief lied us into war. They are telling the world, in effect, that we are a corrupt nation, governed by a corrupt man who is driving a neoconservative, imperialistic presidency for his own, and America’s, nefarious ends. They do all this, no less, while complaining that Republicans are the ones harming America’s image in the world. There is so much more I chronicle in the book, but suffice it to say that they make the case against themselves, more than I make it against them. I’m just recording what they’ve said.