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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Three Cheers for Triangulation; What Lieberman's primary defeat means
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Race
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| Contributor | Brandonius Maximus |
| Last Edited | Brandonius Maximus Aug 13, 2006 01:06pm |
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| Category | Commentary |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Sunday, August 13, 2006 06:45:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Ned Lamont's victory over Joe Lieberman in last week's Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut precipitated the expected torrent of rubbish from left-wing blognuts and conservative wingnuts. There was a nauseating triumphalism on both sides, the unblinking assertion that this one poorly attended summer primary provided a lesson of earth-shattering significance to the future of American politics. Maybe it did, but I hope not.
The wingnuts used Connecticut as a rationale for continuing to wave the bloody shirt of Islamist terrorism as a partisan bludgeon. Vice President Dick Cheney, the nation's wingnut in chief, actually said Lieberman's defeat would give aid and comfort to our terrorist "adversaries and al-Qaeda types." On the other side, Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org and therefore, perhaps, the nation's blognut in chief, proposed the "death of triangulation"—that is, the end of Clintonian moderation—in a Washington Post Op-Ed piece and announced a return to ... well, the party's stupid excesses of the '70s and '80s.
Much was made of Cheney's venting, and it is a bit too easy, after six years of this bilge, to dwell on the Vice President's aura and miss the essential felony of the Bush White House—that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support. Indeed, it has often attempted to use the war for partisan gain. To be sure, there is some grist to the Republican portrayal of Democrats as a bunch of wimpy peaceniks. All too often in the post-Vietnam past—the first Gulf War, for example—the default position of the Democratic Party has been to assume that any prospective use of U.S. military power would be immoral. But Bush's initial post-9/11 response was not one of those times. The invasion of Afghanistan and an aggressive effort to destroy al-Qaeda were supported by just about every Democratic politician. |
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