Dems Plant Seeds of Self-Destruction

The Wall Street Journal has a good overview of the possible effects of an ultra-left takeover of the Democratic party platform will do to its presidential prospects in '08 and it's not good news if past is precedent.

Meanwhile, it has a good take on the speech by McCain last week in the capitol of the Bush-Derangement-Syndrome [along with LA]:

Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited.
"The Senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," said senior Jean Sara Rohe, which makes us wonder what ideals, and manners, she learned at home. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."

Speaking of "havoc," Ms. Rohe spoke only blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The Senator who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton reacted with admirable restraint to these insults, and readers who want to see his remarks can find them posted here.

Mr. McCain was invited to the New School by its president, former Democratic Senator and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Robert Kerrey. When Mr. Kerrey spoke, he was also heckled, with someone shouting, "You're a war criminal!" It'd be comforting to dismiss all this as mere Manhattan derangement, but these passions have become common in liberal media and Web precincts and are spilling into national politics.

Victims of mass-psychosis on the left may rule in the MSM and NYC/LA, but what about the Heartland?

We doubt all of this will help Democrats with the larger electorate, which whatever its doubts about Iraq does not want a precipitous surrender. Americans haven't trusted a liberal Democrat with the White House during wartime since Vietnam, which is when the seeds of the current antiwar rage were planted. The great mistake that leading Democrats and anti-Communist liberals made during Vietnam was not speaking up against a left that was demanding retreat and sneering at our war heroes. Will any Democrat speak up now?

Ironically, the situation in Iraq now improves day-by-day, and US policy might be ultimately successful, although the MSM is heavily invested in a US defeat and will likely call any outcome a loss for the US.

As Thomas Sowell put it so well, the Fourth Estate is a Fifth Column in the USA.