Say Anything Blog

Victor Davis Hanson:

why, if not a deep unease with who they are, do Democrats wheel out an Ike Skelton, John Murtha, or Robert Byrd? Is it for no other reason than these supposedly middle-of-the-road crusty types offer a veneer for the ‘real’ Democratic party that drove out Joe Lieberman, and is best represented by Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, and Barbara Boxer?

I can’t imagine the Republican party showcasing John McCain to broadcast its liberal tendencies as a fig-leaf for Bush, Cheney, etc. At least with the Republicans, what you see, is what you get. Almost anyone of them can get up on stage and more or less represent their conservative message. . . .

But with the present-day Democrats, they apparently must be careful that at any given second a Democratic Senator might go off and compare our troops to terrorists (Kerry), Pol Pot (Durbin), or Saddam’s jailers (Kennedy), or perhaps suggest Iraq was better off under the Husseins (Rockefeller). The result is an addiction to dissimulation, a constant paranoia that without warning someone will say what they feel, and thereby reveal to the American people just how far this bunch has strayed from Harry Truman, Henry Jackson, and JFK—and how radically they have become enthralled with the various victim industries, academia, Hollywood, and the fringe of Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and the Daily Kos.

I think we who live states that happen to have Democrat representation in Congress see a lot of indications of this paranoia.

For instance, my state’s lone representative in the House, Earl Pomeroy, got so frustrated with his party’s chairman’s comments on Iraq earlier this year that he publicly told Howard Dean to “shut up.” Heck, just last month all three members of North Dakota’s federal congressional delegation had to duck Howard Dean during his visit to Fargo.

The Republican party may be on the ropes this election season because they’ve been something less than stellar on core conservative issues (spending, size of government, illegal immigration, etc.) and the Democrats might be able to capitalize on that come November, but the Democrats have long-term problems that outweigh any of the GOP’s short-term woes.  Their party is being taken over by a far-left ideology that, I believe, just isn’t ever going to play well with most Americans.