Beyond Embarrassment

...beyond humiliation, beyond reason, the Bushophobic Left keeps flailing on.

***Valerie Wilson - you know, the Langley broad who thought she was the new Jack Ryan - and her hapless, shit-for-brains hubby "Yellowcake Joe," are suing Vice President Cheney, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, former VP chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and any other Republican they could think of before they ran out of paper for "conspiring to ruin her career."

No, I'm not pulling your legs. The Wilsons really mean to rehash the entire trumped up smear of the Bush Administration over the 2002 State of the Union Address "16 words" about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of uranium in Niger that turned them into fever swamp heroes and national laughingstocks. Is it possible to be a plaintiff and not have to testify under oath?

Oh, well; you know what publicity hounds those "covert agents" are. And remember - ultimately, Jack Ryan became president....

***On their more lucid days, the Clintons do yeoman's work trying to save the party they sucked dry of cash and brain cells from itself.

Over the weekend Hillary gave sensible advice to Arkansas Donks:

Warning Arkansas Democrats to avoid doing things that inflame the state's conservative base, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton advised they seek "consensus on mainstream subjects."

"We do things that are controversial. We do things that try to inflame their base,” Clinton, D-NY, told the Arkansas Federation of Democratic Women, according to the New York Times. "We are wasting time.”

Concentrating on contentious issues only brings out the conservative base, she warned, without specifying such hot-button issues as gay marriage that inflame conservatives and drive them to the polls to vote for Republicans.

One of the core tenets of Clintonism over their last six years was subtlety. They were the biggest left-wing extremists ever to make it to the White House (Remember HillaryCare?), but unlike the current al Donka crop, they actually learned from the 1994 debacle and made sure to emphasize centrist mush they didn't believe in but in which the Republicans could never gain any traction. If Willie had ever managed to keep it in his pants, he might actually have a legacy that doesn't consist of equal parts pecker tracks and 9/11 blood.

The Kos-hacks want to be the raving neoBolsheviks they are and also win elections in a country that is far, far to the right of them. So they keep losing elections and reacting by (1) getting even angrier and louder and (2) moving even further to the left. How ironic is it that it's Boris and Natasha who are the ones to whom it falls to tell them to grow up and rejoin the "reality-based community"?

Other advice in Hill's speech wasn't so sensible, but we'll get to that shortly.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bill was throwing his "legacy" behind poor ol' Joe:

Former President Bill Clinton is sticking up for U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and his support of the Iraq war.

Clinton, who spoke at an Aspen Institute conference last week, questioned why Democrats in Connecticut are focusing on ousting a fellow Democrat, Lieberman....

"If we allow our differences over what to do now in Iraq to divide us instead of focusing on replacing Republicans in Congress, that's the nuttiest strategy I ever heard in my life," Clinton told the nonprofit cultural organization....

Clinton questioned efforts of some Democrats to impose a fixed timetable for removing U.S. troops from Iraq - something Lieberman opposes.

"Why send a signal to the people that are trying to keep Iraq divided and tear it up when we're gonna go," he asked.

Bill Clinton as the voice of reason? Next you're going to tell me that chocolate is a vegetable, grass will start choking out the weeds in my yard, and flab is an aphrodesiac.

Well, it was for Willie, wasn't it?

***I've always thought that the Left's bright idea of attempting to ape the vast right-wing brain farms that serve as the intellectual dynamo of the new permanent majority founders upon the prerequisite that in order to have a think tank, one must be first able to think. Otherwise all they'll be is more tastefully furnished echo chambers and loony bins.

Naturally, though, they'll never lack for cash. And that highlights another marked difference between right-thinkers and left-stinkers: "open, clean, transparent, good" government is, as far as the latter is concerned, "for thee, not for me" (via CQ):

An alliance of nearly a hundred of the nation's wealthiest donors is roiling Democratic political circles, directing more than $50 million in the past nine months to liberal think tanks and advocacy groups in what organizers say is the first installment of a long-term campaign to compete more aggressively against conservatives.

A year after its founding, Democracy Alliance has followed up on its pledge to become a major power in the liberal movement. It has lavished millions on groups that have been willing to submit to its extensive screening process and its demands for secrecy.

These include the Center for American Progress, a think tank with an unabashed partisan edge, as well as Media Matters for America, which tracks what it sees as conservative bias [snort] in the news media. Several alliance donors are negotiating a major investment in Air America, a liberal talk-radio network.

But the large checks and demanding style wielded by Democracy Alliance organizers in recent months have caused unease among Washington's community of Democratic-linked organizations. The alliance has required organizations that receive its endorsement to sign agreements shielding the identity of donors. Public interest groups said the alliance represents a large source of undisclosed and unaccountable political influence. [emphases added]

Secret, unaccountable - isn't that what these people accuse the Bushies of being? Isn't it interesting that lib hypocrisy is directly proportional to the volume at which it is trumpeted? And what do they have to hide? Just where are they getting some of that immense influx of boodle? Hugo Chavez, perhaps? I thought these "hard-edged partisans" were done with Clintonian subtlety.

Hey, they wanna keep their contributors secret (to "protect them from criticism," no less), we get to seed vicious rumors about their skulking. And, you know, criticize them anyway.

***While Mrs. Clinton was dispensing her homespun tactical wisdom down Little Rock way, and never losing sight of a large chunk of her New York constituency, she suddenly reverted in mid-spew to feverswampspeak, like a random facial tick, on the issue that is still the death knell of Democrat election hopes:

Turning to the present world situation, Clinton later told a gathering of mostly Democrats: "We just have to turn on the news, don’t we, to see what it’s like going on around the world - so many conflicts. We need to get back to building partnerships and alliances, to making friends so we can influence decisions that other people make and have people working with us to stem the tide of terrorism and the threats that we confront.”

She added: "If we have to use military power, yes, we have to use it. But use it as a last resort, not as a first resort. Use it after all else has failed.”

Which means she would never use it. She would appease and appease and appease, find any reason she could to avoid using force, even make them up when necessary. Once a counterculture McGovernik, always a counter-culture McGovernik.

The rest of her comment is gibberish. Iran is pushing Hezbollah's war against Israel, and the Bush Administration has spent the past five years pursuing a foreign policy with the mullahgarchy that is scarcely distinguishable from what John Kerry or Al Gore would have done, or what her incontinent, weak-tickered hubby did. North Korea has nuclear weapons and (shoddy) ICBMs because of him. al Qaeda rose from irrelevant nuisance to global threat because of that "last resort" mindset.

Lefties think there is security in numbers and pieces of paper and meaningless jumbles of words. But all that is is hubristic pretext for bowing to terrorism and ducking threats until the day of reckoning finally arrives - like it did on 9/11/01. Threats cannot be confronted until one is willing to actually confront them. Confrontation does not connotate "making friends" - an absurd notion in the case of the current enemy - but defeating enemies that cannot be reconciled, deterred, or satiated save in the blood of millions of our citizens.

Libs cannot accept that it isn't our fault that the Islamists hate us. Or that, as a matter of foreign policy axiom, Will Rogers was wrong.

Oh, yes, and that everything wrong in the world isn't George Bush's fault:

"If you think what's going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn't, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn't get where we are today," said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when he brought together the Northern Irish and the IRA, when he brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians."

"Moral authority"? Bill Clinton? Sorry, some oxymorons are unavoidably whiplash-inducing.

If I may translate for Dr. Demented, he means his party would have dismantled Israel on Iran's and Syria's behalf, ethnically cleansed the entire Holy Land of Jews from one end to the other, gotten a federal judge to declare Islam the official religion of America and the Constitution replaced by sharia, and constructed the new Jewish concentration - uh, sorry, "refugee" - camps on the Capitol Mall itself.

It's telling that Chairman How cites the Good Friday Accords, seeing as how appeasing and legitimizing and feting terrorists was the common thread of Clinton foreign policy. His party's endless interference in Israeli domestic politics to push the Jews to surrender to Yasar Arafat culminated in then-Prime Minster Ehud Barak's 2000 offer of the entire West Bank and Gaza for a Palestinian homeland - national suicide by any other name - and Arafat's response was the second Intifada, which led us "progressively" to the current situation where the Israelis, having yielded and conceded and retreated, have no place else to which to withdraw. Their worst terrorist enemies, Hamas, were elected by the Palestinians to run the PA, they turned Gaza into a terrorist rathive, and the Jews are under seige on two fronts. To suggest that this crisis wouldn't exist if only we'd bullied Israel all the way into the Med is stark raving insane.

All Donks (oustide of poor ol' Joe, anyway) believe this, of course, but one does not ordinarily expect discretion from Captain YEEEAAAARRRGGGHHH!!! But Senator Christopher Dodd?

Channeling Mr. Dean, Senator Christopher Dodd struck the same tone with a Sunday appearance on Fox News. "This Administration, unfortunately, has seen the word diplomacy and negotiation as somehow a favor to your enemies," he said. This is nonsense, as Mr. Dodd, prodded by his host Chris Wallace, conceded when he ruled out negotiations with Iran. [emphasis added]

Depends on the enemy, doesn't it? Where have "diplomacy and negotiation" gotten us with Iran or North Korea? Where has it gotten the Israelis via the vaunted "peace process"? Aside from being on the receiving end of hundreds of Hamas and Hezbollah (and Iranian) missiles.

Congressette Jane Harman is evidently still trying to save her job as ranking Dem on the House Intelligence Committee:

Offering even more nonsense and less substance was Representiative Jane Harman, ranking member of the Select Intelligence Committee, who scolded the Administration for not negotiating with Iran and blaming the American troubles with Syria on "the way we have been conducting ourselves in Iraq."

"Not negotiating with Iran"? Where has this dame been for the past five years? And what has it gotten us except a nuclear mullahgarchy?

And what's "the way we've been conducting ourselves in Iraq" - i.e. liberating twenty-five million Iraqis from a HitloStalineque dictator with nuclear ambitions, rebuilding the country, seeding a genuine democracy there in its place, and deftly crushing the assymmetrical counter-invasion from Iran and Syria at the same time - got to do with "American troubles with Syria" that predated Operation Iraqi Freedom by decades?

This dismal litany couldn't not include a contribution from Aunt Madeleine (via TKS):

A former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright - speaking unusually bluntly considering the traditional injunction in U.S. politics against speaking ill of foreign policy while the President is abroad - said of the Administration, "I'm stunned, I'm frankly stunned that they have not been involved" more in the region. "I wish that the secretary had announced that she was leaving St. Petersburg and going with other foreign ministers to the region to begin shuttle diplomacy," she said on ABC-TV. "We can't wait for the violence to stop."

That, gentles, is why the Democrats will never be entrusted with power again in their current mental misconfiguration. All they care about is "stopping the violence"; they are utterly disinterested in who is pushing the violence and why. They are completely incapable of making moral distinctions between Israel - a western democracy that only wants to be left alone to live in peace - and Islamic theofascists who are convinced of their manifest destiny to conquer the world and haul it back to the seventh century, or kill us all trying. Or, preferably, both.

The Democrat party is U-S-E-L-E-S-S in the war against Islamic Fundamentalism. It is, however, eminently useful in the Islamic Fundamentalists' war against Israel, America, and the rest of the nominally Christian West. And they have generously offered up another heaping helping of it just three and a half months in front of the '06 midterm elections.

'Tis fitting, really, that the party that advocates irrelevance as high foreign affairs doctrine is rendering itself politically irrelevant as a result.