DEM BLUNDERS HELP BUSH

The Democrats and their clueless MSM allies simply employ stupid strategies out of force of habit. They are addicts to past misbehaviors and they just can’t help themselves! Bush's rise back to the fifty-percent approval level, depending on which polls you read, can be traced directly to Dem miscalculations.

Slate's Mickey Kaus, always seismically sensitive to Dem political clumsiness, points out that Old Soldier John Murtha’s righteous anger overpowered his few political brain cells still surviving and his Irish temper prompted him to call for a quick withdrawal from Iraq. Nancy Pelosi, always angry and showing her passionate pain, soon volunteered to second his emotion.

Kaus and other observers believe that, inadvertantly, Murtha let Bush off the ropes where the MSM had him taking belly punches for getting the US into the war via claims that Saddam possessed WMD. Murtha and Pelosi diverted the narrative just at the point when Bush had almost thrown in the towel on WMD.

The National Review pundit John Podhoretz, whatever else you may think of this second-generation neo-con, astutely pointed out soon afterwards on Dec 1st in the NY Post that John Murtha had committed a blunder and done Bush a favor :

GOD bless Jack Murtha. Yesterday we saw how this old patriot, ex-Marine and current Democratic congressman once again came to the aid of his country as he did 40 years ago in Vietnam. Thanks to Jack, President Bush — in a speech at the Naval Academy yesterday morning — spent 40 minutes explaining to the American people that our goal in Iraq is nothing less than "unconditional victory" against the forces of reaction, rejection and Islamic fascism.

J. Po went on to say that Bush was able to change the subject from the how to prove a negative [I did not know Saddam did not have…….] gotcha game the MSM just loves to employ on GWB back to the real world of how we achieve a goal. That is a playing field where the single-minded Bush knows how to play the game.

When you switch the MSM over to the real world and its future, their agitprop hustles over what did he know and when did he know it just don’t work.

Charlie Cook spells this out in his latest e-mail, quoted by Kaus:

While few, if any, would question the right of Rep. John Murtha ... to call for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq, or say he was acting for reasons of political expediency rather than principle, in retrospect, his move might have been strategically helpful to the president.

Prior to Murtha's well-publicized speech advocating an early withdrawal, the spotlight had been on the Bush administration's use of intelligence that led to the decision to go to war, with some questioning whether the administration either lied, fabricated or exaggerated evidence used to justify the United States' action.

Murtha's speech changed the debate, away from whether we should have invaded Iraq and whether the use of intelligence to make that decision was flawed toward the more problematic issue of "what do we do now?"

TNR points out that Steny Hoyer was quick to spot the strategic advantage that the Murtha-blurt provided the Republicans. However, brain-death victim Nancy Pelosi and her tiny pal, Dennis the Menace Kucinich, were their usual mindless selves and marched cliffward along with their lemming-left comrades.

Hillary and even the weathervanes Kerry and Biden are much smarter than the House Dummy Leader and her hysteric histrionic passionate partners in political suicide, or at least permanent minority status.

The Senate has some smart Dems, but the House is led by a group of very confused politicos---Hoyer and a few others excepted.

A comment to the article Hoyer vs. Pelosi in TNR puts it thusly:

When you say that Nancy Pelosi is not a good public speaker because of a propensity for malapropisms, that is a whopping understatement. She is an angry clown. [She is] the very image that Don Rickles' on stage persona projects. The reason that most of us even bother to listen to her pronouncements is the hope that she will say something foolish or ridiculous so that we can all continue to disregard the position of the extreme left that she represents.

Another followup to the TNR piece:

Frankly as a Traditionalist, I hope the Democratic party follows Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean right off the cliff over which they are leading them.
Then, after the inevitable disaster, the far left wing of the party will be entirely discredited and the Democratic party will perhaps reconstitute itself in the tradition of JFK, Harry Truman, and FDR.
If this doesn't happen, the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs. The current leadership is so far left, it doesn't even realize that it is.
-RobertC Beverly Hills, CA

It seems even parts of the Left Coast have had enough!