Democrats Throw Bush Into The Briar Patch

Oh, no! Please don't throw me in that national security Briar Patch!

Not recognizing the political ground had shifted beneath their feet, Democrats continued to press forward with their offensive against the President. They’ve now foolishly climbed out on a limb that Rove and Bush have the real potential to chop off. One would think that after the political miscalculations the Democrats made during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns they would not make the same mistake a third time, but it is beginning to look a lot like Charlie Brown and the football again.

First, the Democrats still do not grasp that foreign affairs and national security issues are their vulnerabilities, not their strengths. All of the drumbeat about Iraq, spying, and torture that the left thinks is so damaging to the White House are actually positives for the President and Republicans. Apparently, Democrats still have not fully grasped that the public has profound and long-standing concerns about their ability to defend the nation. As long as national security related issues are front page news, the Democrats are operating at a structural political disadvantage. Perhaps the intensity of their left wing base and the overwhelmingly liberal press corps produces a disorientation among Democratic politicians and prevents a more realistic analysis of where the country’s true pulse lies on these issues.

Read the whole thing.

It's not so much that there isn't a good and useful public debate to be had on torture, an aggressive military policy against terrorists, whether or not Bush's Iraq idealism is naive, or an expansion of the NSA's eavesdropping program.

It's that 1, we're not actually having that debate because Democrats refuse to actually engage the critical issues honestly, seeing every issue through the nakedly-partisan prism of "How to get Bush" and "How to position myself for 2006 or 2008," and 2, the public can't help noticing that, on every single issue that flows over the political transom, the Democrats take either the anti-American, soft-on-terrorism, or passivity-in-the-face-of-genuine-danger line.

William F. Buckley once had to write about whether Patrick Buchanan was indeed anti-Semitic, as had been widely charged. He concluded that Buchanan's various positions, while each defensible when considered alone, nevertheless expressed, taken together, an unmitigated and unbroken hostility to Israel and American Jewish concerns.

Same deal here. When Democrats are apparently incapable of selective outrage and critique -- when they do not choose their fights, but simply climb aboard every anti-American and terrorist-coddling bandwagon -- it can't help be concluded that the San Fransisco Democrats are back, baby, and this time out and proud.

(As if they ever really went away, of course.)

Thanks to The Corner.

posted by Ace at 01:36 PM

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