driver
September 17, 2006, 9:29am
1
<p>He often ticks me off (reflecting the spirited debate that exists within my party), but he has nailed it with this book review.
Edsall complains that conservatives pursue an agenda that does not have the public’s “decisive support.” Whatever that means, liberals such as Edsall are ineligible to make that complaint. They increasingly have abandoned persuasion and legislation and resorted to litigation and judicial fiats to advance an agenda the public finds unpersuasive.</p>
<p>If Edsall is symptomatic, liberalism is lost in a time warp, thinking in antiquated categories. Edsall approvingly quotes a Democratic activist’s opinion that there are twice as many angry conservatives as there are angry liberals: “Liberals by their very nature don’t get as angry as conservatives do.” Edsall, who evidently has not noticed the vitriol of the liberal blogosphere[Edit: or CC ], is so blinded by his own anger he misperceives Republican realities.</p>
<p>The GOP, he says, courts whites “whose interests are overwhelmingly focused on tempering, if not altogether rolling back, the civil rights movement.” Please. Who favors rolling back guarantees of voting rights and equal access to public accommodations?</p>
<p>If Edsall really thinks Republicans are marching efficiently in lock step, he has missed bitter intraparty arguments about spending, immigration and nation-building. Edsall says the conservative agenda is “to dismantle the welfare state.” Oh? With a prescription drug entitlement that is the largest expansion of the welfare state since enactment of Medicare in 1965? With a 38 percent increase in discretionary domestic spending unrelated to homeland security – including a 135 percent increase in the Education Department’s budget – since 2001?</p>
<p>When Edsall says middle- and working-class cultural conservatives vote for Republicans who then use their power “for noncultural objectives,” he is voicing a familiar liberal lament: All would be well if voters would vote based on important issues – material, economic concerns; their wallets – rather than unimportant ones such as abortion, the definition of marriage, the coarsening of the culture and other moral anxieties. But if those issues are unimportant, why is it that liberals, adamantly supporting partial-birth abortion and celebrating judicial redefinitions of marriage, are so uncompromising about them? As Edsall says, liberalism has become bifurcated. The largest faction looks to government for material help. But the socially liberal “post-materialist” cadre “overwhelmingly sets” the party’s agenda.
Read the whole thing.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/blue_america_in_more_ways_than.html[/url] ”>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/blue_america_in_more_ways_than.html</a></p> ;
<p>When your party gets it together, with regards to the many issues causing its fissures at the moment, give me a call, mmmkay?</p>
driver
September 17, 2006, 10:22am
3
<p>AM:
weenie
September 17, 2006, 10:23am
4
<p>Poor George Will. As a “true” conservative, he’s been marginalized by his own party, left to flail around dissing Bush, Republicans, and Liberals alike. One of the most intelligent and well spoken “true” conservatives, he’s been a frequent critic of Bush and the neo-cons, but, of course, it is not the “true” conservatives who are in charge but rather the radical neo-cons. </p>
<p>My main complaint about Will is that, like so many pundits, his rhetoric helped us get into Iraq, and now he has nothing good to say about it. My other complaint is one I have with so many pundits - they speak from ivory towers, really unaware of the issues truly impacting middle and lower class Americans.</p>
<p>Like…OK…er…mmkay.</p>
<p>No response to my response, there Driver, about your party’s fractures and fissures?</p>
driver
September 17, 2006, 10:33am
6
<p>I addressed it my OP, AM—what you call “fractures and fissures” I called “spirited debate.” The donkeys should try it sometime.</p>
<p>Which rhetoric would that be, Weenie? I don’t recall Will ever being an advocate of war in Iraq. Nor has he been “marginalized.” What are you talking about?</p>
<p>“Liberals by their very nature don’t get as angry as conservatives do.” </p>
<p>(laughing, holding sides!!!) I almost fell off my chair on that one. (Heavy sigh, wiping eyes…) That was really good. Thanks, Driver.</p>
driver
September 17, 2006, 12:31pm
9
<p>The cincy post doesn’t seem to want to give it up for me, Weenie, but the middle link was a good oldie. Don’t see how it did anything to help get us into Iraq (the war had already started), but it was a well done commentary on all the political drama going on. I particularly liked this:
The Vietnam antiwar movement began to burgeon in 1965. It reached its apogee in 1972 with the capture of the Democratic Party and the nomination of the movement’s choice for president. When that nominee, George McGovern, proceeded to lose 49 states, the movement, with the imperviousness to evidence that fanaticism confers, was unshaken in its belief that it was the moral majority. That derangement is now being reprised in the likes of Tom Daschle.</p>
<p>The Senate minority leader is the most prominent national Democrat and will remain such until a presidential nominee is chosen. Daschle, who five years ago voted with a unanimous Senate to endorse regime change as U.S. policy regarding Iraq, and who five months ago voted with a majority of Senate Democrats for a resolution that did not mention the need for French or U.N. approval in authorizing the use of force – the incredible shrinking Daschle from George McGovern’s South Dakota – now says that the president of the United States, not the president of Iraq, is the cause of war.</p>
<p>Monday, a few hours before the president spoke, Daschle said the president had “failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.” Well.</p>
<p>Presumably Daschle meant that Bush has failed to secure the support of the French and a majority of other Security Council members for enforcing the plain meaning of Resolution 1441, which the French co-authored and which the Security Council unanimously adopted. But had the president succeeded, the result would have been the “serious consequences” that 1441 calls for: war. The French and everyone else, including Daschle – the regime-change-endorsing, use-of-force-authorizing Daschle – understood that.</p>
<p>So Daschle’s position is: America is “forced to war” because presidential diplomacy failed to produce a broader coalition for war. With that descent into absurdity, Daschle would have forfeited his reputation for seriousness, if he had one.</p>
<p>There are many honorable exceptions – although with varying degrees of clarity – among the Democrats. Presidential candidates Joseph Lieberman and Dick Gephardt particularly stand out as plausible presidents.</p>
<p>As for Daschle, he has become the Democrats’ Trent Lott, with two differences. Lott was embarrassing about 1948, not 2003. And his fellow Republicans were embarrassed.
</p>
DRJ4
September 18, 2006, 1:36am
10
<p>
</p>
<p>I believe that the U.S. is faltering in the current war against international terrorism, and we are losing our will to prevail. We are losing our fighting spirit as a result of the fighting between Republicans and Democrats on just how to prosecute the war. The President calls the war on terror “the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation.” The President’s speech was attacked, as usual, by a number of Democratic party leaders with Senator Ted Kennedy in the lead.</p>
<hr>
<p>The President believes, as do I, that Islamic terrorists pose a mortal threat to this country and the West in general. Since those terrorists have already attacked the U.S. on a number of occasions – 9-11, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the attacks on our embassies in Africa, the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen and the army barracks in Saudi Arabia – and have attacked commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191, and injuring 1,500, and the London subway, killing 52 and injuring 700, isn’t it his duty to seek to rally and inform the nation? In attempting to prevent him from speaking out, are these Democratic Party leaders performing a public service? I don’t think so.
<a href=“http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/losing_our_fighting_spirit.html[/url] ”>http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/losing_our_fighting_spirit.html</a></p> ;
DRJ4
September 18, 2006, 1:44am
11
<p>
</p>
<p>Next Attack Imminent: Muslims ordered to leave the United States</p>
<p>Urgent news from Abu Dawood, the newly appointed commander of the al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan: Final preparations have been made for the American Hiroshima, a major attack on the U. S. </p>
<p>Muslims living in the United States should leave the country without further warning.
<a href=“http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/paul-williams091606.htm[/url] ”>http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/paul-williams091606.htm</a></p> ;