Biting Back That Old Feeling

Brother Hinderaker directs us this fine day to Donald Lambro's Washington Times column that chronicles the Democrats' rising frustration at their inability to capitalize upon President Bush's allegedly sagging poll numbers:

Democrats hoped they would be scoring political points in this year's election cycle as a result of increasing terrorist violence in Iraq and skyrocketing gasoline prices that have combined to send President Bush's job-approval ratings plunging into the low 40s. But things are not turning out as they hoped. The Democrats are beset by internal division over the lack of an agenda, carping from liberals who say party leaders are not aggressive enough in challenging Mr. Bush's nomination of Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to the Supreme Court, bitterness among abortion rights activists after criticism by Democratic leaders that forced them to pull a TV advertisement attacking Judge Roberts, and complaints from pollsters that they have no coherent message to take into the 2006 elections.

As synergy would have it, we also got two other columns today that speak to the most prominent reasons for the Donks' chronic political ineptitude.

The incomparable Victor Davis Hanson posits what he calls "the Biteback Effect":

Every time one hears a strident censor bring up a purported American sin, expect that he'll be bitten right back by proving the opposite of what he intended — and looking foolish in the bargain.

Examine a few recent examples of biteback.

*We endlessly quarrel over the Patriot Act as an infringement of civil rights....Yet few Democratic senators, including John Kerry, now seem to want to repeal it.

But in terms of what either the British or Dutch are doing, the Patriot Act is pretty tame. We are hardly arresting Americans for inflammatory speech, closing down madrassas, or stripping suspect naturalized Americans from the Middle East of their citizenship — even in a war where the only real danger to the homeland seems to come from Islamicists who are planning our destruction through cells so far undetected often due to our past laxity....After the London bombings and the recent American apprehensions of terrorist suspects from New Jersey to Lodi, those who still demonize the Patriot Act prompt the opposite effect of what they intend; rather than safeguarding our liberties, they endanger them.

*On the basis of an FBI agent's e-mail alleging loud rap music, cold room temperatures, and the rough handling of a Koran, former president Jimmy Carter and Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin advanced Guantanamo as a national scandal and proof of our amorality in this war....

But the more one learns about Guantanamo, after having it raised constantly by such self-righteous and anguished censors, the more it seems unlike any wartime detention center in recent memory — but in ways exactly opposite from the Stalag its detractors imply....Indeed as a general rule, the more hysterically Guantanamo is cited, the more it seems, after introspection, to be a sensible wartime jail under nearly impossible conditions.

*The sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib was reprehensible, but the reaction of its critics was equally so — as in Ted Kennedy's assertion that "Saddam's torture chamber reopened under new management."...

We bandy about Abu Ghraib as something out of the Inquisition, but for those on the frontline it means something far different from the ritual beheading, torture, and murder that characterize the enemy's way of doing business.

VDH offers three sources of "biteback":

1) Left-wing utopianism, which manifests itself as political neuroses and cultural self-doubt when their concept of moral perfection proves inevitably unattainable, versus the megalomaniacal certitude of our Islamist foes;

2) The Left's delusional, cynically self-serving conviction that we really aren't "at war" and never were; and

3) The Left's out-of-power status and obsession with regaining that power. Or, to quote VDH directly, "Instead of advancing a comprehensive counter-agenda to the President's, too many on the Left turn to hysterics." Which gets back to Brother Hinderaker's quip that, "...you can't beat something with nothing."

That segues us to the other column along these lines from Patrick Hynes of anklebitingpundits.com in today's American Spectator in which he expresses sympathy to sane libs (to the degree that that term isn't oxymoronic):

Soon that old feeling, which by now has almost become a state of being, I suppose, will overcome you and once again you will recognize the absurdity behind the wailing and shrieking of your liberal cohorts. Though you will never admit it publicly, you will silently conclude that Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mom turned President-Bush-stalking-war-protester, is either a crackpot or a sideshow or perhaps both. Many of you have undoubtedly concluded this to yourselves already.

It's the same emotional cycle that ran through the Killian forged memo caper, the Downing Street Memo affair, and all the early summer's ginned-up furor over Karl Rove, just to pluck three or four examples from a much larger population. And all generated their own "biteback," and the cycle continues in indefinite perpetuity because liberals are out of fresh ideas and can't get over losing to George W. Bush not once, but twice.

That's why the Dems have no coherent, much less salable, message to take into 2006 and why they can't all get on the same page to promulgate one. As the sordid, tawdry, frankly disgusting Cindy Sheehan saga illustrates anew, the party of the jackass is in the iron grip of crypto-Marxists who are rigid ideologues and uncompromising hatemongers. Dialogue, intra-party give & take, just isn't possible with that poisonous mindset predominating the process.

The closest contemporary parallel I can conceive of is the Palestinian Authority. Just as Mahmoud Abbas is expected to purge the terrorist elements from the PA's governing counsels, so the path back to national viability for the Democrats rests upon their active, ruthless marginalization of the far Left from the unhealthily disproportionate influence it currently wields.

Abbas has yet to carry out his purge. Which should give you an idea of how close a parallel this one is, and is likely to remain.

Now if only Republicans can avoid their equivalent of the Gaza "disengagement"....