Conservative Advocate: Have Democrats gone too far?
The Democratic campaign to undermine the Bush administration has recently taken a turn that should concern everyone who cares about the safety of the country — and especially of its soldiers abroad.
First, let us remember that there’s nothing wrong with a party out of power doing its level best to weaken, and if possible even destroy, its triumphant opponent. People who whine that the two parties ought to “get together and work for the good of the country” simply don’t understand the essentially oppositional nature of two-party politics. The Democrats today are in a truly desperate situation. The Republicans hold the presidency, both Houses of Congress, almost all of the big governorships, and even the mayoralty of New York City. What should we expect the Democrats to do, if not fight back with all the power they can muster?
Shortly after last year’s presidential election, therefore, the Democratic leaders made a decision. One can argue that it was the wrong decision — that they should have bided their time, watched the Republicans govern, chosen their issues carefully, and then put forward counter-proposals of their own. Instead, however, they decided to adopt a far more aggressive strategy. They would take every chance to oppose the Republicans, denounce their policies without constraint or exception — and also without proposing alternative policies of their own. In retrospect, it seems clear that their rather surprising choice of Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic national committee was a major step toward implementing this strategy. And however maladroit Gov. Dean has been in discharging his assignment, he has certainly been true to its spirit.
So we have seen the Democrats in Congress reject President Bush’s proposals for reform of Social Security outright, refusing even to negotiate on the matter unless he first withdrew his proposal to give younger Americans the choice of privatizing a small part of their Social Security payments. They filibustered roughly a third of all his nominations to the U.S. Courts of Appeals, until the Republican threat to ban filibusters against judicial nominees altogether scared some of their wiser heads (like Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.) so badly that they forced a compromise. They are blocking Bush’s choice of John Bolton as our ambassador to the United Nations with one demand after another, and seem prepared to filibuster it to death.
Above all, as the aftermath of the attack on Saddam Hussein has turned into a long battle against his surviving Sunni supporters and terrorist reinforcements from nearby countries, the Democrats have seized on every administration setback to discredit and embarrass Bush and his top aides, whatever the cost to America’s reputation, or even to the lives of its fighting men and women.
They have accused Bush of “lying us into war in Iraq” by claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, even though every major Democrat in Washington was on record as claiming exactly that, before Bush was ever elected. They have mourned loudly, one by one, the inevitable casualties — less than 1,800 dead thus far, in two years — without recalling the 50,000 American lives lost in the Vietnamese war that presidents of their own party began and pursued. They helped keep the memory of the scandalous behavior of a few military guards at Abu Ghraib circulating around the globe for months, in the futile hope that doing so would destroy Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and hurt Bush. More recently, they have called for the closing down of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on the basis of charges of prisoner mistreatment there.
Last week Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois upped the ante by comparing the alleged behavior of American guards in Guantanamo Bay to Hitler’s Holocaust, Stain’s gulags, and Pol Pot’s Cambodian killing fields — which generated 6 million, 20 million, and 1.7 million deaths respectively.
As Mr. Dooley observed, “Politics ain’t bean-bag.” But are the Democrats in danger of overdoing it just a little?
(William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.)