Hugh Hewitt
<font size=4>The Democratic Party needs electoral shock therapy. Soon. Or it won't be in a position to govern responsibly for a generation.
First read the New York Times' account of Al Qaeda's intention to "carry out a significant terror attack on American soil this year." OK, you say, I knew that. We are in a war, and the enemy wants to kill us. So what's new?
What's new is that the war is being conducted against the backdrop of incredible venom within the Democratic Party directed not at the enemy but at President Bush. Read Jim VandeHei's Washington Post story and Matea Gold's Los Angeles Times story on last night's New York fundraiser for John Kerry. Here are a few graphs from the Times' account:<font color=blue><font size=3>
"Jessica Lange denounced the current occupants of the White House as a 'self-serving regime of deceit, hypocrisy and belligerence,' accusing Bush of violating international law."
"Chevy Chase accused the president of invading Iraq 'just so he could be called a wartime president' and quipped the most recent book Bush read was 'Leader of the Free World for Dummies.'"
"In a song called 'Texas Bandido,' John Mellencamp sang 'He's just another cheap thug that sacrifices our young...You're going to get us killed with your little white lies.' And Meryl Streep bemoaned Bush's frequent invocation of religion, saying 'I wondered to myself through the shock and awe, I wondered which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families in Baghdad."
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Put aside the inanity of comments like Streep --I guess FDR is also a war criminal under her way of looking at the use of force-- or the absurdity of Chevy Chase calling anyone a dummy, and instead ask yourself why Kerry's spokesman had to put out a statement saying that Kerry <font color=blue><font size=3>"did not agree with all the sentiments expressed."<font color=black><font size=4>
On the day of this outpouring of hatred for the president from the soul of the Democratic Party, John Edwards was proclaiming in Florida that the <font color=blue><font size=3>"American people are going to reject this tired, old, hateful, negative politics of the past."<font color=black><font size=4> How can Edwards encourage Americans to celebrate <font color=blue><font size=3>"American values"<font color=black><font size=4> when the Washington Post reports that <font color=blue>"[a]t the fundraiser, Kerry praised speakers and performers," and "said every performer conveyed the 'heart and soul' of America." <font color=black>
This poison is not distributed evenly within the two parties. There is no Michael Moore, no John Mellencamp within the GOP fold. Sure there are partisans --I am one, and as the title of my new book makes clear, I think the stakes are very high, and that the Democratic Party will cheat if it can, just as it has for two hundred years. And I think it is inevitable that the Democrats would mismanage the war on terror to such an extent as to leave us vulnerable to massive attacks.
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But I don't think Kerry and Edwards are murderers or thugs
or treasonous plotters; and I don't know of any high
profile Republican who thinks they are either, or that
they are stupid oafs.
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It is true that Edwards has taken millions from plaintiffs' lawyers in a disturbing warning that his policies are very likely to favor this bunch of rascals and their job destroying and cost-exploding courtroom shakedowns, but no one is accusing Kerry or Edwards of making a personal fortune off of corrupt deals. In short, there is no counterpart within the GOP to this pulsating hate within the Democratic Party, its MoveOn subsidiary, or its Hollywood money headquarters.
It isn't just Hollywood and the bizarre Michael Moore either. The New Republic is peddling its <font color=blue><font size=3>"July surprise"<font color=black><font size=4> theory, and editor Peter Beinart was actually on Headline News last night trying to persuade a nation that one anonymous source within Pakistan's ISI was enough of a springboard from which to arch and fly off into the fever swamp of paranoid conspiracy theorists. Tom Daschle is hugging Michael Moore, and John Kerry is whispering to supporters about the gang of toughs he's up against.
Really, this is a party off the rails, in the control of a fringe group unbalanced by the war itself or by the fear of actually having to wage it. It is led by folks like Barbara Boxer who refers to the Madrid bombings as a <font color=blue>"rail accident,"<font color=black> and by relentless partisans like Michigan Senator Carl Levin, who held a press conference yesterday to distort the latest report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which he serves and which is supposed to be above politics.
That committee is releasing a report that faults the CIA's
intelligence on Iraq, but Levin couldn't let this report --
which goes a long way to forever ending the nonsense
about <font color=blue>"Bush lied"-- simply be issued. He had to distort
its message: <font color=blue><font size=3>"As the intelligence committee report...will
indicate, the CIA intelligence was way off, full of
exaggerations and errors, mainly on weapons of mass
destruction. But it was Vice President Cheney along with
other policy makers who exaggerated the Iraq-al-Qaeda
relationship."<font color=black> The committee's report does not deal with
the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, but Levin couldn't let the
public get an unspun look at the committee report.
Instead, he tries to fuel the paranoia that is eating away
his own party.
The examples go on and on. Not one Democrat stepped
forward to tell Al Gore he's out of line with his
conspiracy theories, or to shut down Terry McAuliffe with
his <font color=blue>"Bush was AWOL"<font color=black> craziness. There's no one --not even
Joe Lieberman-- prepared to tell their own party that it
has slipped into the marginal zone.
There is no unringing this bell in 2004. What has to happen, in fact, is for this series of full-throated rants to get wide airing. If I can get a tape of last night, I'll play it over and over, just like I play Al Gore and Barbara Boxer and Michael Moore and all the greatest hits of the looney left. The more America sees and hears Moore, Mellencamp and the MoveOn crowd and the more it sees John Kerry embrace them and Tom Daschle hug them, the more the revulsion will grow. As will the conviction that in this very dangerous season of the country's life, we can't let the children or the paranoid run the nation's defenses or its war with our enemies.
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