Boston Globe Leak

It must be hard to be a Democrat these days. Beholden to (or petrified of) the hard left, afraid to take any position whatsoever because it will either villify you among the base or else make you permanently unelectable - what is a D to do? In the last several elections, the answer is easy: demonize Bush, complain about failure, and take no real position.

It seems that the D's have gone to great lengths to stifle their own position taking potential, at best every once in a while coming up with some lame set of goals ("double the size of the special forces!" "implement the 9/11 commission recommendations!") but otherwise totally mute on specifics. Why? Because the hard left, the Bush hating left, the American hating left, is a monster just itching to get out. But sometimes it does leak out, just a little. Check out today's Globe op-ed by James Carroll.

Make no mistake - there are many on the left that are happy about our troubles in Iraq. A difficulty for America, the death of an American troop, is justice against our large, imperial, oppressive nation. These folks are clearly poisoned by some kind of socialist curse and would spell instant doom for any political candidate, but they underlie the entire power structure of the hard left. Don't believe they could think such things? Lets check out how Carroll ends his Op-Ed, the grand finale:

...If the Democrats take power with the elections tomorrow, congressional hearings will have a lot of such questions to consider. But what about the moral question? For all of the anguish felt over the loss of American lives, can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted? Can we admit that the loss of honor will not come with how the war ends, because we lost our honor when we began it? This time, can we accept defeat?

Yes, he actually did write the phrase: can we acknowledge that there is something proper in the way that hubristic American power has been thwarted?.

The hard left, ladies and gentlment. Disgusting anti-Americanism on parade. I wonder how many of them would commit real treason, given the chance?

The Difference

So, it seems the house has passed the dreaded interrogation bill at last - with 34 democrats crossing over to vote for it. I haven't even looked at what the swarming kossacks are saying about this, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a few more Liebermans come out of this. The Washington Post, has a seemingly balanced summary of the debate and results which is worth a read.

In it, you can see Democrats repeatedly agitating to give detainees more rights and protections, and ultimately being cut off by Republicans. Bravo. Here lies the difference between the parties: one is concerned with the rights of terror suspects, and the other is concerned with protecting Americans.

Get a load of this:

But Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said: "This is how a nation loses its moral compass, its identity, its values and, eventually, its freedom. . . . We rebelled against King George III for less restrictions on liberty than this." Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said the habeas corpus right is so fundamental that it "is un-American" to deny it to detainees held by U.S. forces.

I hate to tell ya Jerrold, but whether the detainees want to rebel against our government or not is of little concern. They already want to kill all of us. Interrogating terror suspects who are not US citizens, who are picked up on the battlefield as unlawful combatants, really has nothing to do with our rights, our liberties, or our constitution. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the rights of Americans, and therefore there is no downside on the domestic front.

Another excellent characterization

Victor Davis Hanson spins an apt metaphor about the current political climate in today's RCP piece The Tortoise and Those Democratic Hares. Loaded with interesting insight, this article succinctly points out that no matter how bad you may think the Republicans are doing, in nearly every case the Democrats have either no solution (at best) or they support ideas which would make things worse.

This makes excellent counterpoint, in my opinion, to the notion of voting the R's out of power.

Nice Opinion Journal Piece

Every once in a while I run across an article that distills many of my thoughts and beliefs into an elegant, readable form that makes me realize how many levels of writing aptitude must lie above my own.

The Liberals' War from Bret Stephens at Opinion Journal is such a piece. I can add nothing to this, except to say: go read it. And pass it on.

Democrats, Socialists, and Netroots

I try to make it a habit to read the left wing blogs somewhat regularly to make sure I see all sides of the picture, as it were. I usually start with the king of lefty blogs, the most trafficked political blog in the world, daily kos. Then I ready mydd just to make sure that they are still doing nothing but repeating what is on dailykos. Then I read some local New England blogs like bluemassgroup.

Anyhow, I take Kos as representative of the entire left wing blogosphere, more or less, since so much of it copies so fully the kos content, tone, and mob mentality. Based on what I've seen, I agree with all the things being said in the press about the scary people on the left, and the extreme leftism of the so called netroots. Netroots (lefty blogs) are not so much democrats as they are socialists. Trouble is, no one on that entire side seems to know the difference.

Take this post and comments for example, which discusses a political trick that Vermot Democrats are doing to make sure that the dems dont have anyone running against socialist Bernie Sanders. Democrats are actually forcibly abdicating their own shot at the Senate in VT, in order to support a socialist!! This meets with universal approval among the commenters, many of whom applaud Sanders' socialism and none of whom criticize it. Many other posters equate his socialism with really great progressivism (I'd agree) and others do the same for liberalism. Democrats, liberals, progressives, socialists - there is no line between any of them, no one sees a difference.

More and more, I don't either.

Republicans: Don't Shed a Tear for Lieberman

I'm confused about why conservatives and/or libertarians give any sort of a damn about Joe Lieberman losing the CT democratic primary. Sure, it means that the netleftists like moveon and dailykos have finally won something, and to the extent that their agenda touches our government, thats bad. And sure, it means that even centrist democrats are going to move to extreme anti bush and extreme anti war positions, and that will be marginally more annoying than what we've seen in recent years. Finally, it represents a movement to the left, which is almost always a bad thing in the long term. So on the surface there are lots of reasons to be unhappy about it but wait! - hey hold on a second here, lets consider the other side...

Lieberman himself has little going for him: He is a democrat. As such, he is fiscally liberal (i.e. welfarey socialistic) yet socially conservative. Talk about splitting the difference the backwards, he's got both positions wrong! Sure, he's pro war and that's great and all (cough cough) but the guy bashes Bush with the rest of em, and in the end he counts towards the democratic tally in the senate majority count, which he will do even if he wins as an independent. In that sense, he and Lamont are equally harmful.

But in Lieberman you had a supposedly centrist democrat with broad appeal in Connecticut whereas with Lamont you've got someone who, while he may or may not be a nutjob himself, will have been installed into power by leftist nutjobs. He will be beholden to them, for sure. As such, we suffer a short term infusion of leftist nutjobbery but potentially reap a backlash against same in the voter population of CT. Sometimes, you have to let the left have power so they can prove to the voters how utterly they must rejected, if not to lend a little momentum the other way. Think Jimmy Carter and pre-94 Clinton. Only Carter's incredible awfulness paved the way for, and enabled, the Reagan revolution.

This is a silver lining that I wish more people would see: its ok to give up a few yards in a close fight in order to let the bad guys blow themselves up for another 20 years.

Better yet, if the saner half of the Democratic party can hold on to their brains, the growing influence of the netleft may yet do what we can all only dream of for the moment: split and permanently destroy the democratic party.

Have a nice day,

Demolisher

ps: counterpoint from PowerLine;

UPDATE: Television reports indicate it's Lamont, winning pretty big. Several people have asked me which candidate I'm rooting for here. Some Republicans think a Lamont win will be a good thing, demonstrating how far off the rails the Democratic Party has gone. Not me. This is no time for partisanship. These days, I feel like a character in Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, with my fellow citizens turning into pods in alarming numbers. I'd like some reassurance that the pod people aren't yet a majority, even among Democrats.

FURTHER UPDATE: On the bright side, Cynthia McKinnie got trounced. Never let it be said that you can't shame a Democrat!

pps: Lieberman could still win in the general. Could the R's have a chance, too?

Juxtaposition

Protests inside the stadium took a gentle form: About 50 of the 3,200 students seated on the stadium floor turned their backs and held up placards denouncing the war as Rice received an honorary doctorate of law. Some 200 faculty did the same, according to a count by faculty members. Approximately 30,000 people attended the commencement, according to BC police.

4 times as many faculty as students "turned their back" on Condi during her BC commencement speech? I call that progress...

Protests of Rice Muted

But then again...

NEWTON -- Outside Boston College's graduation ceremonies yesterday, some 200 protesters chanted, ``Shame, shame!" and ``Give her a subpoena, not a degree, for crimes against humanity!"

...they did have support from the local nuttery. Question: since when is declaring war on a nation a crime against humanity?