Mr. Sowell calls it again.

Thomas Sowell on the Iraqi elections and the predictable response by Senator Kerry:

Senator John Kerry loudly proclaimed on "Meet the Press" that the Iraqi election represented President Bush's "last chance" to "get it right." Nothing is easier than to demand more from somebody else -- even when you yourself have been an obstacle to achieving what has already been achieved.

Senator Kerry has a long record as a defeatist and obstructionist. Back in 1971, he said, "we cannot fight communism all over the world" -- adding in the same arrogant tone he uses today, "I think we should have learned that lesson by now."

Ronald Reagan never learned that lesson -- and hundreds of millions of human beings are free of communist tyranny today as a result. But during all the years when President Reagan was building up our military forces and our intelligence agencies, Senator Kerry was consistently voting against the appropriations required to do so.

What both men were doing was consistent with their respective assumptions and goals. Senator Kerry was just one of the defeatist elitists who regarded the communist bloc as a "fact of life" which we could only accept and which it was futile to waste resources opposing.

They imagined themselves to be so much wiser than other people that condescension was only natural, as they brushed aside any other viewpoint with such dismissive words as "cowboy" or even "stupid." The fact that events proved the defeatist elitists dead wrong in the Cold War -- and now again in the Iraqi elections -- has not yet broken through their smugness.

Probably nothing ever will. But that does not mean that the rest of us need to keep taking their high opinion of themselves seriously.