At least that's Mark Steyn's calculation. While I find Steyn's rhetoric a bit overheated, I find he is largely right. By the 1970s the Democratic Party had essentially lost its claim to rule because it fundamentally misunderstood the central problem of its age, the evil of Communism (to be fair, Richard Nixon made the same mistake). It seems modern Democrats are making the same error by being more concerned with today's political fight than with the shape the world will take, say, ten or twenty years from now. There is a new evil, international terrorism sponsored by a murderous ideology. What do the Democrats aim to do about it? Evidently, they will take an "exit strategy" from reality. Here's Steyn:
One expects nothing from the Democrats. Their leaders are men like Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, who in 2002 voted for the war and denounced Saddam Hussein as an "imminent threat" and claimed that Iraq could have nuclear weapons by 2007 if not earlier. Now he says it's Bush who "lied" his way into war with a lot of scary mumbo-jumbo about WMD.
What does Rockefeller believe, really? I know what Bush believes: He thought Saddam should go in 2002 and today he's glad he's gone, as am I. I know what, say, Michael Moore believes: He wanted to leave Saddam in power in 2002, and today he thinks the "insurgents" are the Iraqi version of America's Minutemen. But what do Rockefeller and Reid and Kerry believe deep down? That voting for the war seemed the politically expedient thing to do in 2002 but that they've since done the math and figured that pandering to the moveon.org crowd is where the big bucks are?
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