Democrats run on fumes, not facts
By Jonah Goldberg
USA Today
BOSTON — <font color=blue>"The Republicans in Washington believe that America should be run by the right people — their people,"<font color=black> Bill Clinton declared to thunderous applause here Monday night. Rarely has a more banal statement been offered with such an air of truth-telling bravado.
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Here's more news for you: Catholics believe that the Pope should be ... Catholic! And, just in case the point is lost on you, Democrats in Washington believe that America should be run by — wait for it — Democrats!
Of course, Clinton is a master of making the ludicrous sound profound — when talking about himself — and damning when talking about others. This was, after all, the president who made school uniforms sound like an issue of world-historical significance. But given the Children of the Corn-like mesmerization of the Democratic delegates who flocked to Clinton like lemmings to a cliff (and the groaning Clinton nostalgia of the media), it's not shocking that he managed to steal so many intellectual bases Monday night.
Consider his silly suggestion that his ban of a few boutique brands of <font color=blue>"deadly"<font color=black> assault weapons contributed to the drop in the crime rate. Or his pugnacious claim that only Republicans seek to <font color=blue>"divide"<font color=black> people while Democrats — who routinely call anyone to their right <font color=blue>"fascists," "Nazis" and "fanatics"<font color=black> — are merely interested in bringing people together.
But this is not a party weighed down by the ballast of facts. Indeed, you have to carry a light pack when racing against the clock. For more than a year, Democrats have been fueled by a violent, irrational hatred of George W. Bush. These feelings were almost never based upon facts, so much as on an almost glandular paranoia.
Librarians set fire to their records, lest Attorney General John Ashcroft's Gestapo find out who borrowed The Catcher in the Rye. They insisted that Bush was some sort of criminal mastermind and buffoon who could orchestrate a war for oil while not being smart enough to work as a spellchecker at an M&M factory. Countless anti-Bush canards contradicted each other, but consistency was a luxury the Democrats could not afford.
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The problem for them is that not even the now decidedly anti-Bush press can conceal the fact that virtually none of these allegations were true. The Senate Intelligence Committee report, the British Butler Report and the 9/11 Commission report undermine every key allegation of the anti-Bush flat-earthers. The 9/11 Commission, which was being hailed as an oracular council of truth and light when it made Bush look bad, has essentially said the Patriot Act does not go far enough (and Ashcroft, by the way, never even poked his nose in a library); that Bush never lied and that several of Bush's more famous accusers did — including those who, knowing otherwise, insisted that Bush's <font color=blue>"16 words"<font color=red> about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of uranium were lies.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, it's too late to revise the anti-Bush narrative. Speaker after speaker made references to Bush's failings and <font color=blue>"crimes"<font color=red> as though everyone's on the same page of the script. Indeed, one of the chief authors of that script — filmmaker Michael Moore — sat with Jimmy Carter in his presidential box Monday night.
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Let's simply put aside the mind-boggling chutzpah that drove Carter to lecture anyone about how to strengthen American foreign policy — after all, there has been no president before or since who has been more embarrassed by American strength and more willing to take dictation from the policy-makers at the United Nations. What was particularly galling was to see Carter (the president who pardoned draft dodgers) zing the sitting president for his military service like some party hack.
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Worse still was Carter's association with Moore, who — his upcoming stint in these pages notwithstanding — strikes a great many Americans as a left-wing Joe McCarthy who practices the worst and most dishonest forms of guilt-by-association argumentation.
In many ways, Moore is worse than McCarthy since at least tail-gunner Joe was right on the big question that Communists are bad. What Moore gets right beyond the spelling of his name is beyond me.
That Moore and Carter could nod their heads while Clinton denounced the <font color=blue>"divisiveness"<font color=red> of the GOP amounts to the sort of effrontery that would have me diving out of their proximity for fear of divine lightning bolts.
The Boston Democrats are running on the fumes of a Bush-record-that-never-was. They gripe about how he's cut education spending, when he's increased it by more than 35%. They claim he lied about WMDs when he didn't. They say he's violated civil liberties when he's been fighting for the survival of liberty. They're betting everything that they can cross the finish line before the American public realizes that the Democrats are coasting on an empty tank.
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Political conventions have become predictable rituals, four-day cheerleading sessions for both parties. So USA TODAY is offering readers an alternative perspective. Conservative National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg is writing daily columns this week from the Democratic convention. Next month, filmmaker Michael Moore, director of Fahrenheit 9/11, will weigh in daily from the Republican convention in New York.
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