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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (50212)	8/26/2005 3:07:40 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 59480

The Dems' Iraq Dilemma BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, August 26, 2005 3:01 p.m. EDT This column yields to no one in our irritation at comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam. But as we've observed before, there is one similarity: Just as in 1968, the Democratic Party is divided. Mickey Kaus has a bit of analysis that rings true to us (emphasis in original, ellipses omitted): Recent multiple exposures to Westside L.A. liberals confirms that (as George Will and Kevin Drum suggest) Hillary Clinton is currently heading for a much bigger train wreck in her party than anticipated--a wreck all her cautious planning failed to anticipate, and probably exacerbated. The same press drumbeat of defeatism about Iraq that has helped bring down Bush's numbers has also emboldened the party's mainstream left base (i.e., not just MoveOn or the DailyKos crowd). They hardly care whether Hillary is a member of the DLC. But they do not want to support someone who voted for the war, as Hillary did. Worse, they want a Democrat who is willing to break from the respectable Beltway Tough-It-Out Consensus now, publicly, in a way Hillary has been unable to do. They're so desperate for a champion they're even temporarily captivated by Sen. Hagel's mere mention of "Vietnam." Hagel/Dean for America! Or maybe Hagel/Gingrich. P.S.: Hillary's dilemma is similar to the one that must have been faced by Bobby Kennedy in 1968--how to break with LBJ and the surface D.C. consensus in favor of the war. But Hillary's dilemma is worse, because Iraq isn't Vietnam and the current Beltway consensus she's being asked to denounce is a lot righter than LBJ was. Even mainstream Bush-bashing libs, in my experience, readily recognize that just withdrawing from Iraq now would be a global strategic disaster in a way withdrawing from Vietnam wasn't. That of course makes them even more determined to hold accountable politicians who got us into Iraq in the first place, and Hillary is arguably one of them.