Category: Politics

Don’t Go Wobbly On Us

Ralph Peters reminds the GOP not to go wobbly on the war:

Republicans are frightened of losing seats on the Hill. Despite all their lofty rhetoric, they just may be willing to gamble away Iraq’s future in order to say, “Look, ma! Only 75,000 troops left in Iraq!”

We don’t need any more premature declarations of “Mission accomplished.”

If the situation warrants a swift reduction, that’s great. But decisions on troop strength must be made by military commanders with Iraqi dust on their boots. None of us wants to hear Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld putting words in soldiers’ mouths again. Trust the troops, not the mandarins.

The right force level in Iraq can’t be decided by political pollsters — that bane of our republic. Military necessity should be the sole criterion.

I have a feeling that a troop drawdown would not only be disastrous for Iraq, but for the GOP as well. The GOP’s greatest strength right now is its national security position. The GOP has systematically pissed off everyone else through grandstanding over Terri Schiavo, the Miers debacle, and years of reckless and irresponsible spending. If it weren’t for the utter cluelessness of the Democrats on critical matters of national defense, a lot of moderate Republicans would bite the bullet and vote the bums out of office. Going wobbly on the war will alienate the base on the single major issue that is keeping the GOP cohesive.

Peters continues:

Perhaps we’ll legitimately be able to draw down our forces below 100,000 by next summer. If so, we’ll all be delighted. But if the situation continues to demand 120,000 troops or more, we need to focus on the mission — not on election-year special effects. Defeating terrorists is far more important than defeating Democrats (who are perfectly capable of defeating themselves).

Winning House and Senate seats but losing Iraq wouldn’t be a victory for anybody in America — no matter which party gained. If the administration makes troop reductions based purely on political calculations, the Republicans will deserve to lose.

Support our troops and bring them home — when Iraqi forces are on their feet. And not one hour before.

Iraq matters. Far more than the fate of Rep. Grababuck.

Peters is right – if the GOP starts reducing troops before the job is done, they’ll have broken their most crucial responsibility. What matters now is not which party has more seats in the Congress in January of 2007, but the continued democratization of the Middle East. Stephen Green says it best – “So here’s something to keep in mind this election year: Vote for hawks, not for parties.”

I’ve the feeling that a lot of people will be doing that next year, which is why the GOP had damn well better be the party of hawks come November.

Dean Backpedals

Howard Dean is trying to furiously backpedal from his previous statements that the US “can’t win” in Iraq:

Seeking to clarify a statement in a Texas radio interview that Republicans harshly assailed and some Democrats questioned, Dean said, “They kind of cherry-picked that one the same way the president cherry-picked the intelligence going into Iraq.”

Dean was questioned on CNN about an interview he gave Monday to radio station WOAI in San Antonio. “The idea that we’re going to win this war is an ideal that unfortunately is just plain wrong,” the former Vermont governor and unsuccessful 2004 presidential candidate said.

Of course, Dean’s statements are a matter of public record, and his context is quite clear. Dean’s statements have clearly backfired, but no doubt they were made in full candor. Dean committed the biggest sin one can commit in DC – telling people what you really think.

Democrats Surrendering From Own Position

The Washington Post notes that the Democrats appear to be backing away from their own position on the war:

Several Democrats joined President Bush yesterday in rebuking Dean’s declaration to a San Antonio radio station Monday that “the idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong.”

The critics said that comment could reinforce popular perceptions that the party is weak on military matters and divert attention from the president’s growing political problems on the war and other issues. “Dean’s take on Iraq makes even less sense than the scream in Iowa: Both are uninformed and unhelpful,” said Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), recalling Dean’s famous election-night roar after stumbling in Iowa during his 2004 presidential bid.

Dean isn’t the only Democrat making noises about surrender – Nancy Pelosi has said that half the Democratic caucus supports the Murtha withdrawal proposal – despite the fact that only 3 members of the House bothered to actually vote for it when it was put up for a vote. As the Investor’s Business Daily notes the Democrats are deeply divided over this issue:

Some Democratic leaders are also putting distance between themselves and the top-ranking Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi of California. Pelosi has embraced Rep. John Murtha’s, D-Pa., idea to bring U.S. forces home over six months.

The dissenters include Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., former senior White House aide to President Clinton. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, his job is to coordinate fundraising and strategy that will get Democrats elected to the House next year — so it’s certain he’s always thinking about votes.

Another is the Democrat second in rank to Pelosi in the House, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. The Washington Post reports that Emanuel and Hoyer have told fellow Democrats in Congress that Pelosi’s posturing on Iraq could backfire on the party.

Hoyer went so far as to issue a statement that seemed to aim straight at Dean and Pelosi:
“I believe that a precipitous withdrawal of American forces in Iraq could lead to disaster, spawning a civil war, fostering a haven for terrorists and damaging our nation’s security and credibility.”

Other Democrats sounded much closer to the White House position than to that of Dean and Pelosi. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who sits on both the Armed Services and the International Relations committees, recently visited Iraq and said this week: “It’s not helpful for Democrats to say all is lost. We need a stable Iraq that is not a haven for terrorists.”

The Democrats are hoping that the war will split the Republican base and expose the President’s weaknesses in time for 2006. On that account, they’re dead wrong. The war is the issue that unites most Republicans, and even the “dissenters” in the GOP such as Chuck Hagel or John McCain all adamantly reject any talk of an arbitrary timetable for withdrawal.

Dean and Pelosi’s comments were incredibly stupid. If half the Democratic House Caucus is for a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, why aren’t more speaking out for it? Why did only 3 Democrats actually vote for the Murtha plan? And what does that say about the Democratic Party as a whole – that they believe that the war is totally unwinnable but don’t have the spines to actually vote for withdrawal? No wonder the majority of Americans see the Democratic position on the war as based on political expedience above all else.

Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark are actually coming up with plans to achieve lasting peace in Iraq and prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for terrorism while other Democrats don’t seem to care about either. If anything, the rabidly anti-war MoveOn.org/George Soros/Daily Kos wing of the Democratic Party will continue to push the Democrats further and further to the radical fringe left, forcing them to play to that base and ensuring that they cannot have a consistent and coherent plan for national security – which is exactly what happened in 2002 and 2004.

The Democrats don’t have a coherent national security strategy. They don’t have an Iraq strategy, and half the party is all about waving the white flag and running away. There are individual Democrats who are quite strong on both issues, but the MoveOn wing of the party keeps marginalizing them. (Just look at what’s happened to Joe Lieberman for his audacity in saying that all is not lost in Iraq…) That isn’t a strategy for victory, that’s a strategy for the Democratic Party’s third consecutive electoral loss.

The Democrats cannot win so long as they’re divided on the war, and if they take the side of the Dean/Pelosi/Murtha preemptive surrender wing, they’ll lose anyway. If the Democrats were smart, they’d start showing how they support victory in Iraq and how they would achieve it. The fundamental problem they face is that Dean and Pelosi are saying exactly what they think – that America cannot win. So long as that idea remains prevalent in the Democratic Party they will be – and should be – a minority party.

Playing Devil’s Advocate

As much as I hate to do this, I have to defend John Kerry against Ed Morrissey’s argument that he compared US soldiers to terrorists. Here’s what Morrissey points out in Kerry’s appearance on Face The Nation:

SCHIEFFER: All right. Let me shift to another point of view, and it comes from another Democrat, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. He takes a very different view. He says basically we should stay the course because, he says, real progress is being made. He said this is a war between 27 million Iraqis who want freedom and 10,000 terrorists. He says we’re in a watershed transformation. What about that?

Sen. KERRY: Let me–I–first of all, there is so much more that unites Democrats than divides us. And Democrats have much more in common with each other than they do with George Bush’s policy right now. Now Joe Lieberman, I believe, also voted for the resolution which said the president needs to make more clear what he’s doing and set out benchmarks, and that the policy hasn’t been working. We all believe him when you say, `Stay the course.’ That’s the president’s policy, which hasn’t been changing, which is a policy of failure. I don’t agree with that. But I think what we need to do is recognize what we all agree on, which is you’ve got to begin to set benchmarks for accomplishment. You’ve got to begin to transfer authority to the Iraqis. And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking sort of the customs of the–of–the historical customs, religious customs. Whether you like it or not…

SCHIEFFER: Yeah.

Sen. KERRY: …Iraqis should be doing that. And after all of these two and a half years, with all of the talk of 210,000 people trained, there just is no excuse for not transferring more of that authority.

Now, Kerry is another blow-dried double-talking politician whose utter lack of cluefulness and intellectual vacuousness are the stuff legends, but I don’t see how Kerry’s statement is equating US soldiers with terrorists. Yes, he said that having a bunch of US troops burst into your home at night would be a terrifying experience – well, duh! Of course it would be. That doesn’t mean what they’re doing is wrong or unjust or unhelpful, but if you’re an Iraqi women and a bunch of heavily-armed foreign troops enter your home searching for a terrorist, speaking a language you don’t understand, that’s going to be a frightening experience – even if those troops are doing precisely what they should be doing. At least with Iraqi troops they speak the same language and observe the same customs.

Now in typical John Kerry fashion, Kerry argues that Bush’s policy has “failed’ while offering the exact same policy restated and claiming it as his own – a technique that he used repeatedly in 2004. However, while Kerry is a preening and vapid fop whose ignorance of national security could fill volumes, arguing that he’s equating G.I. Joe with Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi here is a bit of a stretch. Yes, Kerry’s being Kerry and filling his lack of ideas with enough verbal diarrhea to fill a dump truck, but in the interests of fairness, his words don’t justify Morrissey’s conclusion.

Of course, if Kerry thinks that Democrats aren’t divided on Iraq, I’d like to see him justify the difference between the moderate wing of his party as represented by Senators Lieberman, Clinton, and former Gov. Warner and the radical “withdraw now” wing of the party as represented by Reps. Pelosi and Murtha. Then again, Kerry’s always been able to keep contradictory arguments in his head simultaneously like that – after all, he voted for the war before he voted against it…

Lieberman’s No Squish

I have a lot of respect for Senator Joe Lieberman, who has been one of the few Democrats to carry on the honorable legacy of Henry Truman, Scoop Jackson, and other strong leaders of the Democratic Party. I may not always agree with the Senator on a lot of issues, but on Iraq he provides and eloquent and passionate defense of the Iraqi people in their fight against terrorism:

It is a war between 27 million and 10,000; 27 million Iraqis who want to live lives of freedom, opportunity and prosperity and roughly 10,000 terrorists who are either Saddam revanchists, Iraqi Islamic extremists or al Qaeda foreign fighters who know their wretched causes will be set back if Iraq becomes free and modern. The terrorists are intent on stopping this by instigating a civil war to produce the chaos that will allow Iraq to replace Afghanistan as the base for their fanatical war-making. We are fighting on the side of the 27 million because the outcome of this war is critically important to the security and freedom of America. If the terrorists win, they will be emboldened to strike us directly again and to further undermine the growing stability and progress in the Middle East, which has long been a major American national and economic security priority.

Lieberman, much to his credit, understands the nature of this war. We’re fighting terrorism in Iraq, there can be no doubt of that. Al-Qaeda has joined us in battle there, and it would be deeply irresponsible for us to simply abandon that battle. What message would we send to al-Qaeda by once again proving bin Laden’s belief that we have neither the courage nor the will to fight? How can one possibly reconcile a doctrine that would be rightly seen as an admission of weakness and defeat with prosecuting the war on terrorism to its fullest? Lieberman clearly understands the massive internal contradiction of that argument.

Furthermore, Lieberman touches on something that I think the President must strongly address tomorrow at West Point – this isn’t a war against Iraq, this is a war in which the interests of Iraq and America are one. Not only do we have the same interests in defeating terrorism and leaving Iraq a safe place to live, but what would a surrender say about our commitment to human rights as a nation? Do we merely play lip service to the concepts of democracy and human rights but would leave 27 million to anarchy and slaughter for what inevitably amounts to short-term political gain? Actions speak louder the words, and for all the hand-wringing about how we’re perceived because of Iraq, how would posterity judge us if we broke Iraq and left it broken? We owe it to Iraq, and we owe it to ourselves to finish the job and finish it right.

Lieberman also notes something important that the President should address:

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground. The administration’s recent use of the banner “clear, hold and build” accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.

Our initial reconstruction strategy was a disaster. The CPA did the best it could under difficult circumstances. We made a lot of mistakes, but as Lieberman notes, we have a strategy that works. We never had the ability to hold territory in Iraq, and even if we had the manpower, holding Iraq would only further cement the idea that we were foreign occupiers. The only way to effectively pacify Iraq over the long term is to have Iraqi units capable of keeping the peace. Slowly but surely, that is what is happening. Condoleezza Rice has taken over from the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis and instituted the “clear, hold, and build” policy which is the best policy for the long-term stability of Iraq. Taking out the terrorists helps, but unless Iraqis can build up their country on their own, we could never stop the violence as much as is necessary.

Lieberman is right. The media is spinning this war into a loss while our soldiers and their Iraqi compatriots are making palpable progress with each passing day. Even none other than former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin realizes that an artificial timetable in Iraq would be a disaster for thr region. Our war on terrror requires us to finish the job in Iraq, and thankfully there are leaders on both sides who are willing to put partisanship aside and do what’s right for the future of this country and for a more peaceful world.

Blowback

The Washington Post makes note that 70% of the American public thinks that Democratic criticism hurts troop morale and is being made for little more than partisan gain:

Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale.

The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush’s Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.

Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”

Jeff Goldstein has some interesting thoughts on this poll. In general, I agree with his analysis. The Democrats are painting themselves once again as the party of pessimism, defeatism, and weakness. The position that the Democratic Party is credible on national defense doesn’t even begin to fly when they’re advocating surrendering to al-Qaeda. We’re not fighting Iraq now, we’re fighting al-Qaeda with the Iraqis at our sides. Does anyone really believe that abandoning the field of battle to al-Qaeda is a sane strategy for dealing with terrorism? Especially since we’d almost inevitably be drawn back into Iraq to take care of the problem we would have created.

The American public doesn’t trust the media in the slightest. The last Kennedy Center poll found that the media was the most singularly distrusted public institution in America. And indeed, as much as the left wants to turn Iraq into Vietnam, our troops tell an entirely different story. The military is the most trusted public institution in the country according to that Kennedy Center poll. In the battle of public information, people are going to be more likely to trust the people who have been to Iraq than the media. In fact, the polling has been quite consistent – a majority of Americans thinks that the media provides negative and unbalanced coverage of events in Iraq.

As bad as the Republicans have been this year, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot. Their slow drift to a pro-surrender position has further cemented their well-earned reputation as the party of weakness on national security. Their constant stream of pessimism doesn’t provide them with much traction. The American public is rightfully fed up with the state of American politics and media – and they’ve every reason to do so.

The Democrats have never been able to develop a coherent Iraq strategy. All they have been able to do is harp and criticize. That isn’t enough, and it never has been. Especially when members of the military are completely and utterly contradicting the left, the attempt to spin Iraq into a defeat is simply not working. The American people see these attacks for what they are – manifestations of shameless partisanship and nothing more. The Democrats’ attacks are foolish in the extreme. It’s one thing to offer constructive criticism – but the Democrats haven’t done that – they’ve embraced the radical left wing of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan. When the “stars” of your party are calling the murderers of children “Minutemen” and saying that American soldiers are no better than Ba’athist thugs, it’s hard to take the patriotic high ground.

The fact is that the withdrawal position argues that America is too weak to fight a protracted war, we should surrender to a group of al-Qaeda backed thugs who indiscriminately murder children, and that we should leave Iraq a broken and shattered society. Those are the consequences of a pullout before the job is done. The Democrats cannot back away from them, try as they might. Does anyone really believe that Iraq won’t descend into anarchy unless we leave them with the training they need to fight back? Does anyone really believe that a devastated Iraq won’t turn into the perfect breeding ground for terrorism? What would such an action say about our commitment to democracy? Hell, what would that say about our commitment to basic human rights? What lesson would our enemies take from the knowledge that we don’t have the will to take the fight to them for long?

The Democratic position on the war is short-sighted, self-serving, and harms the morale of our men and women overseas. There is no sugar-coating those facts – and the American public sees it the same way. The Democrats are not even trying to grapple with the consequences of surrender in Iraq, they just want to continually attack the Bush Administration. Their message isn’t taking. For all the doubts the American people have about Iraq, they’re not idiots. They know what the score is, and they know that after 9/11 we all stood together and proclaimed that our colors don’t run.

The Democrats are asking us to cut and run.

That isn’t what Americans do.

Finally Fighting Back

The Bush Administration has finally decided to get off its ass and call out the Democrats by name when they make irresponsible statements about the war and try to rewrite history.

It’s about time. The White House has allowed these stupid attacks to continue and has done almost nothing to fight back. In public opinion, you cannot let a lie go un-countered, and the fact that Bush has waited until that lie has been repeated ad nauseam before striking it down is inexcusable.

However, the Democrats are exceptionally stupid to pursue this line of attack, and it seems to me that the only reason they are is because the radical antiwar left has seized control of the Democratic Party. First of all, these attacks unite the Republican base. After the Miers debacle, a smart party would have sought to further the divides in the Republican party – and as Bob Krumm finds, when you take national security away, the Republicans are very divided – but the Democrats are playing right to Bush’s key issue.

Secondly, even if the Democrats win, they lose. The Democrats can’t get a mulligan on their vote for war. They voted to approve force in Iraq – and that’s a matter of record. Furthermore, they’re own statements make it quite clear that they believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was a threat. They can’t escape their own records, and the Democrats are on record as saying things that not even the Bush Administration was willing to say. They can jump up and down and talk about how they were “misled”, but all that gets them is the tacit acknowledgment that they didn’t do their homework.

The argument that Bush “lied” about WMDs is a deeply stupid one – and yet that’s the argument that the American people keep hearing.

Finally, the Democrats are once again putting themselves as the party that is totally out of alignment with American values. According to the whining about their “patriotism” being attacked – while at the same time viciously attacking anyone who doesn’t drink their particular brand of Kool-Aid. However, even John McCain is going after the revisionists and the “Bush Lied!” crowd. It’s one thing to try and impugn the President – it’s another thing when John McCain is calling the Democrats’ bluff.

I think Glenn Reynolds hits it right on the head when he notes:

…this illustrates that the “Bush lied” issue has more to do with anti-Bush sentiment than with anything having to do with the merits of the war.

But it’s not “dissent” that’s unpatriotic, something I’ve been at pains to note in the past. It’s putting one’s own political positions first, even if doing so encourages our enemies, as this sort of talk is sure to do. And that’s what I think is going on with the sudden surge of “Bush Lied” stuff from Congressional Democrats.

Of course, outrage over questioning of patriotism is kind of one-sided. You can say that Bush and Cheney started the war with a bunch of lies to enrich their buddies at Halliburton, and that their supporters are all a bunch of chickenhawks on the White House payroll. But that’s different because — because Bush is anti-evolution, and doesn’t support gay marriage! Or something.

That’s precisely it. The debate over the war in Iraq has little to do with war, Iraq, or anything else. It’s all about attacking George W. Bush. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to talk about the war in Iraq with an anti-war activist without it turning into a litany of reasons why George W. Bush is an evil person.

The problem with all this is that in the long run, talking about the man rather than the policies is stupid. The Democrats are trying to indulge an increasingly fanatical side of their base whose dripping hatred for the President outweighs anything else – and the whole rhetoric of the Iraq War has been shifted to a substantive discussion about politics, strategy, tactics, and the Middle East into a referendum solely on one individual. All this debate has generated a lot of heat, but no light. The fact is that the Democrats are behaving in a profoundly irresponsible way, and they deserve to have that behavior criticized.

As the old saying goes, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” and the fact that the Democrats are trying to simultaneously say that any criticism of their position is impugning their patriotism while viciously attacking the patriotism of their attackers isn’t going to work. The GOP is finally willing to stand up and fight, and the Democrats’ arguments just aren’t going to fly.

What will happen is that the vast majority of Americans are simply going to do what any responsible citizen would do – tune the whole stupid pissing match out. And who can blame them? Neither party is particularly adept at advancing anything other than partisanship. Saying that Congress spends money like drunken sailors would be an insult to the fiscal habits of drunken sailors. The American people are quite rightly fed up with the state of American politics and both parties are going to suffer because of it.

The Democrats are embracing a losing strategy of debating the issues of 2002 rather than 2005. The Republicans are pissing off their base with their fiscal irresponsibility and a sense of institutional arrogance. President Bush would do well to appear above the fray, but for too long he’s abrogated the bully pulpit to do that now.

It’s good that President Bush is fighting back against the baseless charges of an increasingly irresponsible Democratic Party. It’s bad that he’s waited so long to do it. It’s horrendous that he has to do it all.

Election Day Recap

Michelle Malkin has a whole host of links on the results of yesterday’s elections. Fortunately for the GOP, mid-season elections like this rarely portend much. Unfortunately for the GOP, the lackluster Kilgore campaign is a sign that despite a very well-organized GOTV campaign, the GOP is in trouble. Part of it was the fact that Kilgore didn’t run a great campaign and Kaine got extra momentum in October. However, it is also quite clear that Republicans can’t afford complacency in the slightest. Virginia is a red state, and if Kilgore couldn’t defeat somone like Tim Kaine, that does not bode well.

The California ballot initiatives went down in flames, a blow to the Governator – but the George Soros-backed Ohio ballot initiatives also went down in flames. This seems to me to be less a story about which ideological side won and lost and more about how a raft of confusing ballot initiatives will turn off the electorate. The power to use initiatives and referendums can be an effective way of making state and local governments more democratic, but they also tend to do badly when presented as special elections. Ballot initiatives are often confusing, and people don’t tend to pay much attention to politics in off years – and many don’t pay attention to politics at all.

2006 is a year away, and midterm elections are influenced as much by candidates and circumstances as national politics. However, the loss of Jerry Kilgore in Virginia should be a wakeup call to the national GOP leadership – who have shown a lack of leadership and conviction in the past year. If Americans are going to get a GOP that’s only slightly less willing to spend than the Democrats, why not vote for divided government? The Republicans alienated the middle with the Schiavo affair, and alienated the conservative base with their fiscal irresponsibility. This has been an annus horribilus for the GOP, and many of their wounds are self-inflicted.

However, 2006 is another year, and if the GOP can get its act together, things can change. The question is how much real leadership can the party summon in order to present a coherent platform and how well the GOP can attract strong candidates to carry that message forward. If those things don’t play out as needed, the improvements to the GOP’s GOTV efforts may not be enough.

UPDATE: Michael Barone offers some analysis of the election results:

Democrats, after their victories in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, are arguing that these results, together with the national polls, show a repudiation of the Bush administration. Republicans are arguing that these were just local contests, with no national implications. They’re both right and both wrong.

As always, Barone has some of the best analysis in the business.

The Party Of Petulance

The silly little stunt pulled by the Democrats yesterday indicates just how far the Democrats have fallen as Bush Derangement Syndrome spreads through the Democratic side of the aisle faster than a cold. The Democrats were hoping to kick Bush while he was down, but found themselves once again in a position of weakness as the Republican base closed around Alito and the Fitzgerald investigation failed to bring down the Bush Administration. So now the Democrats are petulantly demanding that there be an “investigation” to justify their idiotic assertion that Bush “lied” about Iraq, and they were too sheeplike and stupid to question it.

The Democrats have nothing else to fall back upon but trying to refight the battles of 2002. They have no agenda for anything else. Furthermore, by doing so, it gives the GOP the perfect counter – the Democrats saw the same intelligence as the White House. They came to the same conclusion. So if Bush is a liar, so are they. It’s not an argument they can win, and this kind of idiotic theatrical stunt is only going to make themselves look bad.

The Democrats just don’t have a clue. The Republicans should thank God they have such an idiotic opposition, or they’d be sunk. Just when Bush’s fortunes appeared to be running on empty, the Democrats come up with a sure-fire way of once again making them the party of weakness and petulance. They’ve even managed to get Bill Frist hopping mad, and that’s quite an achievement. This stunt will light a fire under the Republican base, alienate moderate voters who want solutions to today’s problems, and appeal to the radical MoveOn wing of the party that provides lots of fundraising at the expense of alienating everyone who isn’t a spittle-flecked partisan.

Meanwhile, the GOP has an excellent Supreme Court nominee with a stellar judicial record, a tax reform plan that would significant reduce regulatory burdens and increase GDP growth while eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax and mortgage exemptions on homes over $1,000,000, and an agenda that looks forwards, not behind.

The Democrats are emulating the failed tactics of the 1998 GOP – which only proves that those who fail to learn from history are damned to repeat it – although it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch…

UPDATE: The Bull Moose blog has some more thoughts on the Democrat’s anti-war positioning:

Will the American people have faith in and trust a party that claims that it was gullibly duped, or as George Romney claimed about another war – that it was “brainwashed.”? Moreover, should the objective be re-fighting the reasons to go to war and making the Democrats the official anti-war party or should the goal be achieving reasonable success in Iraq? If you believe in the former than you would encourage more efforts like the one Senate Democrats undertook yesterday. If you believe in the latter, you want the opposition party to present a better plan for winning this war.

While the war is increasingly unpopular, the Democrats should be careful that they are positioning themselves as a party that is gullible, feckless and indecisive on national security. It may provide immense partisan satisfaction to flummox the Republicans on a procedural maneuver, but beware of the long-term impact on the party which already suffers from a perception of being weak on national security.

The Fitzmas That Fizzled

“Scooter” Libby has, or I should say had, a reputation as a smart and gifted lawyer. Why in the world he’d be dumb enough to purger himself in front of a grand jury is beyond me. However, it seems quite clear that Patrick Fitzgerald has his ass in a sling. Fitzgerald’s no slouch when it comes to running a tight investigation, and Libby’s own idiocy has been his downfall. If he doesn’t go to jail, it will be by the skin of his teeth.

At the same time, all the Democrats with visions of Karl Rove getting “frog-marched” out of the White House were disappointed. Fitzgerald essentially said that had Libby not lied, no crime would have been committed. What Libby did was no worse – and probably far less damaging to national security – than what Sandy Berger did when he destroyed valuable evidence related to the attempted millennium terrorist attacks. Then again, the facts don’t matter to the raving partisans of the left. They’re convinced that Valerie Plame was some super-secret agent, and that an anonymous star at the CIA designating the loss of a covert CIA agent is the result of her “unmasking” despite the fact that the star also corresponds to the war in Iraq. For some, facts aren’t what’s important, just partisanship.

Glenn Reynolds wraps it up quite well:

ONE OF THE THINGS I’VE NOTICED in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that’s very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs — that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

There are lots of problems with this, beginning with the fact that it’s not true. I’ve addressed much of this — especially parts 1 & 2 — in earlier posts like this one, this one, and especially this one. It gets tiresome having to repeat this stuff, but the new history, despite its falsity, is just too convenient for too many people to be stopped by anything as simple as the truth.

Democratic politicians who supported the war want an excuse to tack closer to their antiwar base. Shouting “It’s not my fault –I’m easily fooled!” would seem a substandard response, but it is a way of changing position while pretending it’s not politically motivated. Meanwhile, journalists, most of whom were reporting the same kind of WMD stories that Miller did (because that’s what pretty much everyone thought — including the antiwar folks who were arguing that an invasion was a bad idea because it would provoke Saddam into using his weapons of mass destruction), now want to focus on her so that people won’t pay much attention to what they were reporting themselves. This makes Judy Miller a handy scapegoat.

But, as I say, the biggest problem with this revisionism is that it’s not true. I guess we’ll just have to keep pointing that out.

And indeed we will.

The left continues fighting over 2002, while the most basic nature of the war has changed since the fall of Saddam. Right now the people of Iraq are fighting alongside us in a battle against a group of radical Islamic fascists who have every intention of plunging Iraq into civil war – or worse. Nobody who has even the slightest interest in a more peaceful world can advocate turning our backs on Iraq. But it isn’t about Iraq, or world peace, or anything else. It’s all about the hatred of George W. Bush. It’s all about political ideology and political power. And trying to distort history by repeating the same old pack of lies over and over again is exactly what the left does best.

Scooter Libby did something phenomenally stupid, and he deserves to face the punishment for it. However, if being stupid were a crime, we’d have to turn California into a prison and put a good fraction of the Democratic Party there. Fitzmas fizzled for the left, but no doubt it won’t reduce their zealotry one iota.

Reynolds also notes something very important that is getting utterly missed in the discussion of this case: the fact that the CIA royally screwed up:

THE BIG LOSER in the Libby affair, it would seem to me, is the CIA. At least it will be if anyone pays attention.

Consider: Assuming that Valerie Plame was some sort of genuinely covert operative — something that’s not actually quite clear from the indictment — the chain of events looks pretty damning: Wilson was sent to Africa on an investigative mission regarding nuclear weapons, but never asked to sign any sort of secrecy agreement(!). Wilson returns, reports, then publishes an oped in the New York Times (!!) about his mission. This pretty much ensures that people will start asking why he was sent, which leads to the fact that his wife arranged it. Once Wilson’s oped appeared, Plame’s covert status was in serious danger. Yet nobody seemed to care.

This leaves two possibilities. One is that the mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn’t care much about Plame’s status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.

The other possibility is that they’re so clueless that they did this without any nefarious plan, because they’re so inept, and so prone to cronyism and nepotism, that this is just business as usual. If so, the popular theory that the CIA couldn’t find its own weenie with both hands and a flashlight would appear to have found some pretty strong support.

Either way, it seems to me that everyone involved with planning the Wilson mission should be fired. And it’s obvious that the CIA, one way or another, needs a lot of work.

Porter Goss has been doing exactly that over the last few months, but cleaning up the CIA will be a major effort indeed. Wilson’s trip seems to me to be a deliberate effort by rogue elements of the CIA to attempt to influence and discredit our Iraq policy – which means that the CIA was trying to act as an unelected branch of government rather than an intelligence service. Allowing the CIA to have a say in policy is always a dangerous thing – see Pigs, Bay of – which is why it’s as crucial as ever that the CIA be reigned in. Thankfully, DCI Goss seems to understand the need to reform the CIA and restore it to performing its core mission rather than playing partisan politics, but changing the culture of an entrenched bureaucracy is a task of nearly Sisyphean proportions. Someone at the CIA screwed up, and unless that mess is cleaned up, we’re going to have plenty more “intelligence failures” – something that in a time of terrorism is absolutely intolerable.