helping the Dems...

This post and the next couple will be for liberals who read this page. I seriously want to at least have a fair competitor. There is a serious risk of the Democratic Party imploding even before 2008, I've said too much, just read...

Cindy Sheehan and the Democrats

This summer’s noisy protests against the Iraq war are a dangerous warning--but not dangerous to President Bush. They are dangerous to the Democratic party. And the great political question in the United States over the next few months is: Will the Democrats succumb?

No question, President Bush has political problems. A majority of Americans now say that the war in Iraq is going either “very badly” (28%) or “moderately badly” (another 28%) according to the latest CNN/Gallup poll. A majority (54%) agree that the country “made a mistake” in going to war in Iraq. And 33% of Americans want to withdraw troops from Iraq immediately.

But make no mistake: Americans are unhappy about the war in Iraq because they fear they are losing--not because they think the war wrong or immoral. Americans do not blame “American imperialism” for the problems of the Middle East. They know that Islamic terrorism threatens their country and favor strong measures to crush terrorism.

The so-called peace movement that has been drawing so much attention with its media stunts at the Bush ranch this summer thinks very differently. It opposed the Afghan war and now opposes the Iraq war because it opposes any and all American wars, successful or unsuccessful. It denies the reality of terrorism--or else thinks terrorism an unfortunate but understandable response to American aggression.

Here for example is Cindy Sheehan’s explanation of the war in Iraq. Sheehan of course is the summer’s media sensation, the mother of a Marine killed in Iraq who kept a vigil at President Bush’s Crawford ranch until the end of last week:

“Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy … not for the real reason, because the Arab Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy.”

[PNAC is the acronym for the "Project for the New American Century"--a three person think tank in Washington DC that fills a large place in the imaginations of America's left-wing.]

Those words come from an email Sheehan sent on March 15 to the producers of the ABC News program, “Nightline.” Sheehan has since claimed that these words were inserted into her letter by a supporter, but this claim has been exposed as false by the journalist Christopher Hitchens in the online magazine Slate. (See www.slate.com/id/2124788/sidebar/2124791)

But Sheehan’s excuse is if anything even more revealing than the truth. It is indeed the case that the antiwar movement is heavily populated by people who regard the whole 9/11 war as a Jewish plot.

The more Americans see of the antiwar movement, the more appalled they will be.

There is great nostalgia on the American left today for the antiwar movements of the 1960s. Leftists now in their 60s remember the marches, the cheering, and of course the sex. What they forget is that it was the reaction against the riots and the protests of the 1960s that delivered the White House to the Republicans for 20 of the 24 years from 1968 until 1992.

Today an even more extremist antiwar movement is again beckoning to the Democratic party. Some Democrats are listening: It looks as if Ohio Democrats will run the violently antiwar Paul Hackett as their candidate in that state’s 2006 Senate race. Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold is planning to run an antiwar campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.

But the leaders of the national party--Bill and Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Harry Reid, and others--are resisting. They have seen this movie before--and they know how it ends: with the Democrats marginalized and the Republicans back in power.