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| Home Front: Politix |
| Are You a Ned Lamont Republican? |
| 2006-10-25 |
| by Stanley Kurtz, National Review Are we turning into the Ned Lamont Republicans? No, I’m not talking about Republicans racing for the exits in Iraq. I’m talking about the Ned Lamont-style party pure-o-crats of the Right: the folks who hope to punish insufficiently conservative Republicans by handing over Congress to the Democrats. At least Ned Lamont supporters once believed they could win the general election. Pure-o-cratic Ned Lamont Republicans, on the other hand, openly hope to lose; they are destroying their insufficiently pure party with eyes wide open, seriously intending to hand Nancy Pelosi the speakership, actually expecting to see the president’s hands tied by a dovish Democratic congress, perfectly willing to sweep away the last remaining barriers to unrestricted immigration, and doing it all in the belief that we’ll sail through all these calamities no worse for the wear. say “Ned Lamont,” but I really mean “Eugene McCarthy.” The purifying began for the Democrats with the anti-war presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy in 1968. That year, anti-war Democrats were angry at Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, for his refusal to repudiate President Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Humphrey was a classic liberal, and a vice president who simply wanted to stay loyal to his president. If elected, Humphrey would very likely have followed a more dovish foreign policy than Johnson — or certainly than Richard Nixon. Yet by staying home on Election Day to punish an insufficiently dovish Humphrey, the Eugene McCarthy Democrats handed the presidency to Richard Nixon. Clever, huh? Besides obtaining the worst conceivable election result from the standpoint of their own policy preferences, what did the McCarthy Democrats achieve? Well, in addition to handing the country over to their bitterest Republican foe, within four years, the liberal McCarthy Democrats succeeded in taking over their party. Not only did these dovish Democrats nominate an anti-war candidate named George McGovern for the presidency in 1972, the McCarthy-McGovern Democrats instituted a set of race and gender quotas for convention delegates that insured left-wing control of the Democratic party for years to come. Brilliant. (Except for that whole issue of winning elections, that is.) . . . . Our country is now so deeply divided that a huge number of Democrats, and vast sections of the mainstream media, are actually rooting for the United States to lose a war. That’s not a wild accusation; it’s a simple fact, as anyone who’s been paying the least bit of attention understands. Ever since our army got a day or two’s worth of indigestion early on in its rapid and spectacularly successful military invasion of Iraq, the media and the Democrats have been aching for a failure to tout. Now that we face genuine problems in Iraq, the doves are in seventh heaven. And unfortunately, this all-too-public rooting for defeat in Iraq tends be a self-fulfilling prophesy. There may have been a moment when thoughtful conservatives could afford to send a message to their Republican leaders by handing the country over to the Democrats. This is not that moment. Two years. That is more than enough time for this country to be drawn into a decisive showdown with emerging nuclear powers of North Korea and Iran. A Democratic Congress gives Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a giant-sized green light to go nuclear. And it surely ties the president’s hands if he determines, at any point in the next two years, that we’ve got to take aggressive action to halt the proliferation disaster we now face. But hey, no worries. We can restore deterrence in the face of North Korean ICBMs with that huge anti-missile system Speaker Pelosi will surely agree to pay for. Illegal immigrants? No problem. We can depend on a Democratic Congress to put a first-class border security operation in place, with a fine new fence, and a substantial force of crack immigration agents. And besides, even if things don’t work out that way, we’ll all have fun getting really, really angry at that nasty old Speaker Pelosi. And, of course, that will guarantee the election of a wonderfully conservative president and Congress in 2008. Right? Yeah. for sure. . . . |
| Posted by:Mike |