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UVA poly sci prof thinks the Dems have taken over the moniker previously reserved for the GOP: that of the stupid party.
Twice during the past half century, the Democratic party has faced a challenge from its left wing. In the late 1960s, it was the mass movement of the New Left that rose up to defy the party’s liberal-progressive core. Following a contest of ideas and of wills, the liberal center collapsed and briefly yielded control to its radical critics. The struggle today is strikingly different in tone, with the party’s mainstream being bullied by a network of techno-thugs, spearheaded by MoveOn.org. Nothing remotely resembling an idea or a sustained argument has surfaced in this conflict, and there is no danger that one ever will.
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Today, the Democratic party mainstream has its values, its instincts, and, as usual, more than its share of 10-point programs. It even has its “isms,” represented by its leading troika: the pragmatism of Hillary Clinton, the idealism of Barack Obama, and the populism of John Edwards. Yet its intellectual reservoir has shown itself to be lacking in depth and confidence. Today’s Democratic mainstream is no more willing or able to stand up to the party’s present leftist insurgency than the older mainstream was to stand up to the New Left. The tenor of the current left is best captured by something Lionel Trilling said in 1949 about conservatives: They do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”
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What emerges from Bai’s study of the coalition is that the tone of MoveOn’s recent New York Times ad assailing General Petraeus as “General Betray Us,” far from being exceptional, is perfectly typical of the discourse preached and practiced by this so-called progressive coalition. The ad stood out because it exposed to the world at large the ugly style the new radicals have developed for use among themselves–and because it forced the main Democratic presidential candidates, who declined to disavow it, to show publicly their fealty to the movement.
The Democratic party, its prowess renewed by a taste of success in 2006, is riding the crest of a political wave. It is the stupid party triumphant. What serious Democrats must now consider is whether to accept this state of affairs–or begin to think deeply enough to find a principled ground for rejecting a faction in their midst that is not only stupid but dangerous as well.
Thomas Sowell calls a spade a spade.
… Too many Democrats in Congress have gotten into the habit of treating the Iraq war as President Bush’s war — and therefore fair game for political tactics making it harder for him to conduct that war.
In a rare but revealing slip, Democratic Congressman James Clyburn said that an American victory in Iraq “would be a real big problem for us” in the 2008 elections.
Unwilling to take responsibility for ending the war by cutting off the money to fight it, as many of their supporters want them to, Congressional Democrats have instead tried to sabotage the prospects of victory by seeking to micro-manage the deployment of troops, delaying the passing of appropriations — and now this genocide resolution that is the latest, and perhaps lowest, of these tactics.
Jed Babbin with more on the Turk/Armenian maneuvering that perfectly illustrates how many Dems have lost their minds.
… Speaker Pelosi is apparently so intent on forcing an end to American involvement in Iraq that she is willing to interfere in our tenuous friendship with Turkey. When she does, it will be an historic event: the House of Representatives will be responsible for alienating a key ally in time of war and possibly interdicting supplies to US troops.
Richard Cohen, who must be one of the most decent people in DC, gives needed perspective on Turkey.
Jim Taranto with a new look to an old candidate.
The Captain and Real Clear Politics say Harry Reid might get what he deserves.
Mark Steyn thinks we need a coherent ideological framework for our culture to prevail in our war on ……. whatever.
… In Britain in the 1960s, the political class declared that the country “needed” mass immigration. When the less-enlightened lower orders in northern England fretted that they would lose their towns to the “Pakis”, they were dismissed as paranoid racists. The experts were right in a narrow, economic sense: The immigrants became mill workers and bus drivers. But the paranoid racists were right, too: The mills closed anyway, and mosques sprouted in their place; and Oldham and Dewesbury adopted the arranged cousin-marriage traditions of Mirpur in Pakistan; and Yorkshire can now boast among its native sons the July 7th London Tube bombers. The experts thought economics trumped all; the knuckle-dragging masses had a more basic unease, convinced that it’s culture that’s determinative. …
Ben Stein has misc. advice.
ABOUT a week ago, I was swimming in my pool when I had serious difficulty breathing. “Uh-oh,†I said to myself, “now I am about to die.†My wife was upstairs reading, way out of earshot and, anyway, if I were about to have a lethal heart attack, I wouldn’t be able to scream.
It turned out to be a nasty but short-lived bronchitis, and as I was lying in bed recovering, I thought, “I will die someday, and before I do, I would like to share with you the best possible thoughts I can, in gratitude for the many insightful letters I have received over the years from my readers.†…