Article

2004-09-28 Home Front: Politix

Archived material is restricted to Rantburg regulars and members. If you need access email fred.pruitt=at=gmail.com with your nick to be added to the members list. There is no charge to join Rantburg as a member.

Posted by BigEd 2004-09-28 11:04:59 AM|| || Front Page|| [11128 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Dems are hitting rock bottom. This incoherence can't last much longer. Either McAuliffe, Lockhart and the other idiots will be bounced, and old hands like Biden and Holbrooke will take charge, or else the current big tent will collapse and the party will recreate itself as a Mikey 'n' Jimmuh-style, isolationist, openly leftist party pushing an inward-looking, anti-globalization foreign policy agenda.

Posted by lex 2004-09-28 4:25:32 PM|| 2004-09-28 4:25:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#2 ...Which will be very bad for America. You really don't want your political middle-ground thundering left towards something like, say, that of any Euro state...

Posted by Bulldog 2004-09-28 4:44:58 PM|| 2004-09-28 4:44:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#3 Lol! BD, if the lemmings go far enough left, they'll be in the Pacific... Any ocean will do, actually. We just have to steer them the last half-klik or so, to make sure there's a nice high cliff... The view, you understand, it's the view we want to make sure they don't miss as they go over. Just another service we provide to our loonies. You have Dover, right? Wanna share methodologies?

Posted by .com 2004-09-28 4:51:33 PM|| 2004-09-28 4:51:33 PM|| Front Page Top

#4 The weird thing is the way the party's leaders, after Dean's surge, began to adopt the rhetorical posture of the Kos/Mikey crowd--consipracy-mongering, furreigner-bashing dressed up as anti-capitalism...

Apparently Dean's ability to raise so much $$$ in rapid order and totally outside the party hierarchy must have scared the party heavies into thinking they had to pander to the Kos wackos without bothering to think through the ramifications. Hence the ridiculously incoherent messages, all over the map, from teh campaign each week.

Posted by lex 2004-09-28 4:59:11 PM|| 2004-09-28 4:59:11 PM|| Front Page Top

#5 The majority party for the last century and longer, if one believes Mead, adopts internationalism. Isolationism is the clear alternative to internationalism. It is the position to which a permanent minority party gravitates. The Democrats will be the permanent minority party until they shed their current leadership and begin to have new ideaqs that challenge the new majority that has not yet gone stale.

This may take longer than lex expects. I think all the Vietnam protesters will have to be removed from positions of power in the party before this happens, either through age or election. One of the disadvantages of the gerymandered districts we now have is that election is a much less effective tool for removing obsolete politicians than it once was.

Posted by Mrs. Davis 2004-09-28 5:09:48 PM|| 2004-09-28 5:09:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Perhaps. But the Iraq War and the asymmetric threat both make it very difficult for Americans to maintain a clear distinction btn internationalism and isolationism. US isolationists tend to suspect dark internationalist conspiracies-- "limeys", "reds," trilateralists 'n' black helicopters, saudis 'n' halliburton 'n' carlyle, etc. Some of these narratives were at least consistent and had some resonance with mainstream policy: Roosevelt did indeed seek to unwind the British Empire, and Truman did indeed seek to contain the SU. Plenty of Americans find the UN a joke.

But the saudi meme falls apart. The Iraq war can't be made to fit the pattern: the saudis opposed it, as did Kofi, and it was the French who bartered (Iraqi) blood for (TotalFinaElf) oil contracts. No one outside of the DU morons seriously believes that the Iraq War was "about oil."

The same confusion applies to Russia and France. Americans know that France is not an ally and that Russia's no longer an enemy. Beyond that, the isos and conspiracy-mongers can't fit these nations into any plausible or coherent scheme.
The same Dems who are most likely to go hard isolationist are also the ones mumbling pro-UN platitudes about "multilateralism."

As to timing, who knows? OTOH there are plenty of Vietnam-generation Dem leaders who remain reasonably sane and hawkish: Biden, Gephardt, Holbrooke, Gary Hart, and Lieberman.

OTOH these types and their world-view don't resonate with the new activists mobilized by Dean, Mikey, Soros et al. Those activists tend not to care much about foreign policy at all, let alone security; they tend to be parochial warriors whose notion of cosmic conflict is Franken vs Limbaugh. Let's reserve judgment till we see who replaces McAuliffe.

Posted by lex 2004-09-28 6:59:11 PM|| 2004-09-28 6:59:11 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 I really think that they are about two election cycles from total meltdown. I was watching Dean on TV yesterday and my daughter said he looked "Scarry." Truly they all look mental; from time to time. You can't stay a majority party when your candidates scare teenagers. When my daughter gets ready to vote (4 years) she will remember the scray guy/gal. Think of a Democrat that hasn't put on a scary (angry) face during this election cycle. And that what the Dems have become, the party of fear and loathing.

Posted by Cyber Sarge 2004-09-28 7:08:23 PM|| 2004-09-28 7:08:23 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Agreed. When a screamer is your party's most viable candidate, there's something deeply wrong.

Blame it on Trippi and the deanforamerica.com meetups.

Imagine that a million black helicopter types suddenly pumped $100 million into a campaign for Pat Buchanan and you get a sense of how the Dems have been nuked by Mikey n Markos and co.

Posted by lex 2004-09-28 7:50:40 PM|| 2004-09-28 7:50:40 PM|| Front Page Top

23:55 Paul Revere
23:55 Paul Revere
23:52 The Prosecutor
23:52 The Prosecutor
23:50 The Prosecutor
23:50 The Prosecutor
23:46 FU
23:46 FU
22:32 FU
22:25 FU
22:21 FU
22:17 FU
22:17 FU
19:34 Anonymous6709
18:20 Anonymous6707
17:54 Anonymous6706
13:33 Anonymous6703
10:15 lex
09:03 Mrs. Davis
06:37 Howard UK
06:10 Sock Puppet of Doom
05:50 Sock Puppet of Doom
05:42 Michael
02:19 Mohammed al-Sahaf