I first heard of it from John Gibson, host of Fox News' afternoon news-and-commentary program The Big Story. He said, offhandedly, that former Walter Mondale campaign manager and Democratic operative Bob Beckel had begun to frame the war as a ratio: namely one American to every 25,000 Iraqis. Paraphrased, "Couldn't you live with Saddam Hussein in power if it meant bringing back those 1,000 dead men and women?" goes the latest plunge into depravity. I overheard it a week ago while cooking dinner. Driving from my church parking lot, I heard it again, this time for real, on a local AM radio station. A Democratic congressman tried it on. "You know, they're talking about how great it was to free 25 million Iraqis, but was it worth 1,000 of our best?" I know what my reaction was. Imagine yours, if this is your first introduction to the hope and spirit of the left.

It is the adolescent who looks around the walls and foundation of accomplishment by men who have come and sweated before them, only to whine, "this can't be all." The left has always preferred not to distinguish between tyranny and liberty, the free world and the rest of the planet where life is a walking nightmare of fear, encouraged ignorance, depravation and miasmatic violence. Theirs is a world where the American military exists for no apparent reason — why do all those people suffer? It must be the West's fault. Do they understand that the elimination of one of those men who contributed to the world's disorder secures us in the near and long terms? No. Is the "international community" an abstracted, stained glass window on New York's East River, or is it a collection of states where some are free and others are ruled by brutal strongmen who commit horrific atrocities? Isn't "getting together" about helping one another, coming up with solutions and not euphemisms? Negotiation has become an end unto itself: work with the dictator through the United Nations! Treat a distrustful man as an honest broker. Plead with him not to do what he most enjoys doing, and don't you dare try to actually solve the problem! Leave that police state as it is!

It's like somebody's old joke where a close-fisted churchgoer gets chewed out by his priest one morning after Father spies him hesitating, then replacing in his pocket the five dollar bill he'd brought for the poorbox. The two are on the walk out in front of the church, the priest berating him over failing moral obligations of the fortunate to help the destitute, when suddenly a sincere-looking beggar interrupts the lecture, asking for help. The man, eager to fulfill his duty, fishes out his Lincoln and hands it to the beggar, patting him on the back and wishing him well.

"You fool!" roars the priest. "What'll be left for the poorbox?"

I ask again: where and what is this "international community" when 25 million neighbors have the door shut in their face?

The common retort to this challenge is that Iraq or Iran or whichever country it is that needs to be liberated or protected is one of so many, that "we can't save them all." Of course, that isn't the point. Japan and Germany were one of so many. So was Italy. And South Korea. Those numbers add up, and as one looks back, any one of those victories now taken for granted could just have easily been cast aside as adventure on the people's dime. It's another shell game. Just like Iran is now the "real threat," a claim made by those who have no interest to deal with Tehran's mullahs but to appease them, the trick is to draw the country off from one mission with the hopes that we'll lose interest before hunkering down to take on that "real threat."

Now some on the left are content to tell us flatly that they'd take their chances in leaving Saddam Hussein in power. The work from his office and others with terrorists would go on; the Iraqi people would live a life unimaginable to most of us; and the Near East's culture of death would continue to fester, given the free world's nod of assent. Instead, today, the governing bodies of Iraq fight terrorism; the Iraqis have the first opportunity for representative democracy in history; the entire region's leaders know, with deep-seated fear, that Iraqi success will only stir the hearts of Near Easterners to aspire to the same. But to Bob Beckel, the congressman I overheard today and likely more Democrats, none of these things were worth, in wartime, the lowest casualty rate in human history.

Follow the reasoning, repugnant as it is. Kuwait could learn to be an Iraqi province, couldn't it? — certainly not worth the lives of three hundred? And for only the price of South Korea, 50,000 men would be grandfathers today. Europe, poor, confused Europe — coexistence with the Nazis or the Soviets or the Imperial Japanese, their respective concentration camps churning and burning until their human fuel ran out, all to resurrect 400,000 more. Those alive again would be Americans, of course: Beckel and the others are explicit in the high exchange rate of "our" lives for "theirs." Why not rewrite history and fill in quiet, placid ends for the 500,000 dead Yankees and rebels, even if it would mean keeping the Africans in chains? Not so much of a stretch; preserving that proud institution of human misery was once the prime motive of the Democratic Party. Let's be a British colony again, so the feet of young men don't crack and bleed from tramping barefoot in snow.

Absurdity is so near this latest pitch, the illustration of reductio ad absurdum is almost unnecessary. You would think that after Ted Kennedy twisted the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to transmogrify President Bush into a human plague, nothing more reprehensible could come from the left. But here they are, and what a clever bunch!

THANKS, JEFF: Jeff Medcalf comments. And a commenter of his own — wait for it — offers yet another example of the left's moral sterility.