It was commentator Michael Barone who, after watching several debates, said Republicans want to fight terrorism while Democrats want to fight global warming. It’s easy to fight inanimate objects — they don’t fight back.

However, Democrats tend to go wobbly when they have to oppose flesh-and-blood opponents, such as their own special interest groups.

This week, the left-wing group Moveon.org published a rather vile full-page advertisement in the New York Times that smeared the character of Gen. David Petraeus. There is a subgroup of American leftists who hate this nation and, of course, hate the military, and the Moveon.org ad reflected a combination of paranoia and venom. Moveon confirmed Thursday that it paid $65,000 for the ad, about a 67 percent discount from the standing NYT rate of approximately $181,000-plus for a full-page ad. However, a Times spokesman denied the discount was due to any political bias, but was due to other factors regulating the newspaper’s ads.

The Republicans in Congress called upon the Democrats to renounce such hate speech. But Democrats in both the House and the Senate rejected calls to condemn the ad, saying Republicans are trying to take attention off what they call the president’s failed Iraq policy.

That, of course, makes no sense. Condemning the ad would take about ten minutes, hardly time enough to take senators’ minds off the nation’s Iraq policy.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, introduced an anti-ad measure. But Democratic leaders said they would not allow a vote on the nonbinding resolution. Shouldn’t the leader of our forces in Iraq, and a man who has risked his life for his country, be treated better by the Democratic majority?

There are those who believe the United States should leave Iraq now. Certainly, you can hold that position without supporting repugnant ads smearing the character of an honorable man. Yet most Democrats did not question, much less condemn, the ad nor did they criticize Moveon. Shouldn’t they have displayed more integrity and moral courage?

Before he was president, John F. Kennedy wrote the book “Profiles in Courage.” (Well, his name was on the book, which was ghostwritten by others.) Chapters profiled both Republicans and Democrats who had taken courageous stands.

If another “Profiles in Courage” was written today, the Democratic section of the book would be a mighty slim volume.