Sunday, June 25, 2006

Will Someone Please Provide the US with a Serious Opposition Party

SWNID sincerely wants for the Democratic Party to survive and thrive. Really, we do. Despite our appearing to be a yellow-dog Republican, we nevertheless hope for a thoughtful, vital two-party system with two thoughtful, vital parties.

Today's Sunday talk shows pretty much destroyed any hope of that happening soon. They revealed in sharper relief than ever that at the national level the Ds will say anything to pander to the electorate, regardless of how what they say squares with anything else that they've said.

The issue of the day is amnesty in Iraq. Iraqi PM Maliki today gave an outline--short on particulars--of a "national reconciliation" plan that would grant amnesty from prosecution for any insurgents who (a) have not killed American forces or Iraqis; and (b) renounce violence.

Sounds good, right? After all, you can't kill all the insurgents. There are just too many of them. "With malice toward none, with charity toward all" and all that. It's not a perfect approach, but war is an imperfect means of dealing with imperfection. Every nation we know of with a significant insurgency has ended up with some kind of amnesty at the end.

So what did Barbara Boxer, Carl Levin and Russ Feingold say on the Sunday morning talking-head programs? They condemned the whole thing because, as they style it in typical Democrat unison, it would dishonor the sacrifices of America's war dead. (Check RealClearPolitics for links to transcripts; we were alerted to these statements with excerpts on NPR.)

Yes, these are Senators Boxer, Levin and Feingold, all advocates of the Democrat cut-and-run strategy (we use the phrase advisedly, knowing that it has been condemned as a Republican mischaracterization but finding no better phrase to capture the essence of the position). These are the folks who believe that it would not dishonor the brave men and women who gave the last full measure of devotion to "redeploy" troops to Kuwait or Okinawa or Missouri or wherever.

Moreover, these thoughtful, vital senators would have us believe that if American troops were redeployed, the United States should still be able to exercise such influence over the Iraqi government as to demand that Iraq bring a fratricidal level of retribution against any and all who have opposed the current government, the legitimacy and effectiveness of which these senators have regularly called into question.

There's only one explanation for this utter nonsense, this super-tight circle of self-contradiction. These folks have become so cynical that they think they can make a bogus move to the "right" of the Bush administration, briefly decrying "amnesty" (now sadly a dirty word in the body politic after our recent shouting match on immigration) and wrapping themselves in a blood-soaked flag. And they think that no one who casts a vote in this country will notice that their position this morning was completely at odds with everything they've said for the last two years.

I can think of few political feints so brazenly insincere or positions so devoid of any sense, common or uncommon, as this one. This is what Jonah Goldberg said "stewed the bowels" when the Ds reacted to an early leak of this plan in the same outrageous way a couple of weeks ago. We now have a serving of twice-stewed bowels.

We admire the achievements of many Democrats in our republic's history. But the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson and Truman is not the party of Boxer, Levin and Feingold. Hey, the party of Boxer, Levin and Feingold isn't even the party of Cleveland, FDR, JFK, LBJ and Clinton. It isn't even the party of Andrew Johnson and Jimmy Carter. It's the wretched party of MoveOn.org, George Soros, The Daily Kos, Howard Dean and Barbara Streisand.

It's a party led by people whose view of the world is so repugnant to the people who elect them that they have to hide it behind a daily parade of apocalyptic slogans, each utterly incoherent with the last and with any observable facts. It's a party so desperate for power that it will say anything, promise anything to get attention. It's a party so impotent that it has nothing to celebrate but defeats by smaller-than-expected margins.

What's sad is not just the state of the Democrats. It's the reality that the longer any party rules without a serious opposition, the less effective and more corrupt it will become. The mistakes of the Bush administration could have been ameliorated by an effective opposition that offered realistic, thoughtful alternatives that played a role in political debate and shaped policy and decision-making. Instead, we get blather like this, which deserves every bit of the scorn that the majority party has given it.

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