Lieberman Assists Dems in Elaborate Samurai Suicide

Like the fabled samurai who slowly takes his sword and carves out his intestines and other internals before his suicide is complete, the Democrat Party prepares once again to exhibit its nihilistic isolationism as the party's calling card in the Fall elections.

Nihilism because the internal logic of Democrat domestic policies would produce another version of an EU fetus, bathing in an amniotic moisture so self-referential that protectionism defends the state from external pressures.

Isolationist because the Democrat Party's denial of a terrorist threat means no reason to project American defenses abroad---with the inevitable repetition of another 9/11, spurred by the Democrat denial that led Bill Clinton to brush off the first WTC attack, instead of regarding it as a warning that there was more to come.

Jacob Weisberg is right on the money with his Slate article today on the CT. primary.

The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush's faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.

Weisberg makes the most salient point of all about the Democrat head-in-the-sand Pollyanna politics:

...like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue. In turning viciously on stalwarts of the Cold War era like Lyndon B. Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson, anti-war insurgents called into question the Democratic Party's underlying commitment to challenging Communist expansion. The party's Vietnam-era drift away from issues of security and defense—and its association with a radical left hostile to the military and neutral in the fight between liberalism and communism—helped push a lot of Americans who didn't much like the Vietnam War into the arms of Richard Nixon.

Jimmy Carter proved that weak Presidents blunder into major foreign policy miscalculations that produce an Islamic Republic in Iran and a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at least partly motivated by the USSR's perception that Carter was as pitiful and impotent as he appeared to be. Ronald Reagan came to the rescue of the USA and the Dems were gnashing their teeth in the outer darkness, convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority, while the US won the Cold War. Weisberg has an analysis somewhat the same, and extrapolates it into the coming years:

...the real significance of the Connecticut race was what it says about the party nationally, and what it portends for the next presidential election. In 1972, the Democrats repudiated their flawed Cold Warriors and chose as their standard-bearer a naive and honorable anti-war idealist. It was not George McGovern's opposition to Vietnam but his larger tendency toward isolationism and his ambivalence about the use of American power in general that helped him lose 49 states to Richard Nixon. In a similar way, the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad. Nixon had the gift of hippie demonstrators and fellow-traveling bluebloods like Ned's great uncle Corliss Lamont as antagonists. Today's Republicans face an anti-war movement with a different tone and style, including an electronic counterculture of enraged bloggers and callow entrepreneurs like Ned himself. Yet the underlying political dynamic is not altogether different.

The Democrat Party has a defective political leadership, a troika of Reid, Pelosi, and Dean which makes analogies with the Three Stooges perfectly appropriate. Larry, Curly, and the irascible Moe Dean will inflict a party whose time would appear to have come into the usual internecine squabbling and bickering unbecoming of a national leadership team. Weisberg finishes up with a warning:

Whether Democrats can avoid playing their Vietnam video to the end depends on their ability to project military and diplomatic toughness in place of the elitism and anti-war purity represented in 2004 by Howard Dean and now by Ned Lamont. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for 2008, is trying to walk this difficult line, continuing to express support for the war in principle while becoming increasingly strident in her criticism of its execution. As the congressional elections approach, many Republican candidates are fleeing Bush's embrace because of his Iraq-induced unpopularity. But Lamont's victory points to a way in which Bush's disastrous war could turn into an even bigger liability for the Democrats.

The drug-crazed meth-fiends from Blazingpuppylake and other maniac sites are already hyperventilating and frothing over their anticipated triumphs. Like their heroes, the Arab insurgents and their socialist predecessors, these hacks inebriated with their own triumphalism may just mimic Nasser and his generals on June 6th, 1967, who declared war on Israel and immediately began celebrating a victory that Six Days Later looked disastrously premature. The rabid rapid ultra-left could just do a repeat performance, like the previous manifestoes of "I am Girlie-Man" Markos Moulitsa, of premature gesticulation.