Democratic Quagmire

http://www.imao.us/archives/004800.html

The Time Has Come
A Fact's a Fact

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It's Time to Face Facts: The War Against Bush Is Unwinnable
An Editorial by Frank J.

The Democrats and progressives have been waging a war on Bush for years now. It started out for admirable reasons - getting Bush out of power using any means possible - but now it has become obvious that this can no longer be accomplished. Instead, the only ones losing power are Democrats. This war has to end.
"We thought the American people would welcome us as liberators."

How many Democrats have lost office in this fight against Bush? While people seem to care about the death counts in Iraq, no one takes note as the number of Democrats who have lost office increases. Not only that, but there is the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from losing against Bush. It is obvious that Al Gore will never be able to live a normal life again and will require constant supervision for the rest of his days. Just check the internet for more instances of people having lost their minds trying to fight against the ethereal foe that is the Bush Presidency. And, to what end is this?

Some will still argue that progress is being made, pointing to Bush's low approval ratings. "Sure," they say, "we weren't able to get rid of him in 2004, but soon enough people will turn against him to impeach him!" This is pure idealism that ignores the attitudes of those we are trying to free from the tyranny of Bush. We thought the American people would welcome us as liberators when we kept up are full out attacks on Bush, but they are obviously more concerned with terrorists than Bush and have turned against us Bush-attackers. It's sad, but it is true.

So, do we give up and let Bush win? I'm afraid to say he already has won. Perhaps one day we could make people fear Bush more than terrorists, but, if we keep up in this way, there will be no Democrats left in office by the time that happens. We have to admit to ourselves that we attacked Bush without any real strategy for victory, and now it is time to pullout of this conflict. Instead, we must try and get Democrats back in power by focusing on our core issues: piddling-crap things such as healthcare and other free-handouts.

The war against Bush is just not worth another Democratic politician.

 

another article on point.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-2_13_06_MB.html

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February 13, 2006
The Politics of Negation
By Michael Barone

American politics today is not just about winning elections or prevailing on issues. It's about delegitimizing, or preventing the delegitimization of, our presidents. This thought sprang into my head as I was reading the angry and sometimes obscene Democratic Web logs and noted the preoccupation of some bloggers with the impeachment of Bill Clinton, now seven years in the past.

For them this was a completely illegitimate exercise, because Clinton was being attacked for his sex life. I think this is wrong, since reasonable people could either (a) say Clinton deserved impeachment because he lied under oath in a federal court proceeding or (b) say that impeachment was inappropriate, because the offense was not central to his service in office.

Naturally, most Republicans agreed with (a), and most Democrats with (b): We all tend to break ties in favor of the home team. The Democratic bloggers note correctly that impeachment didn't help the Republicans politically. But they still seem incensed, and I think that's because they believe that impeachment, in their view unfairly, tended to delegitimize the Clinton presidency.

It has been a habit of presidents to try to write their own history, to establish themselves as a legitimate embodiment of America's past and shaper of America's future. Franklin Roosevelt did it better than any other 20th century president, relating his actions to those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln, his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, and his onetime boss, Woodrow Wilson. FDR encouraged the idea that history is a story of progress toward an ever larger and more generous government. That version of American history was propagated by a brace of gifted historians and in most mainstream media.

For decades afterward, presidents were judged by the FDR standard. Harry Truman was crude and ineloquent, but he made tough decisions and got them mostly right (a view that stands up well). Dwight Eisenhower smiled and played golf, but was an inarticulate bumbler (a version that doesn't stand up at all). John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were stalwart and compassionate liberals (which ignores the facts that they embarked on the Vietnam War and wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr.). Richard Nixon was a villain who left in disgrace (even though he extricated us from Vietnam and greatly expanded government).

Ronald Reagan wrote a different version of history. Like FDR, he showed that a strong and assertive America could advance freedom in the world. But unlike Roosevelt, he saw government at home as the problem, not the solution, and he utterly refuted the liberal elites who said that low-inflation economic growth was no longer possible and that America was on the defensive in the world. Not so. We've had low-inflation growth for most of the past 25 years, and the Soviet Union has disappeared. History doesn't always move left -- sometimes it moves right.

Democrats unsurprisingly don't like this version of history, and in Bill Clinton they had a president with the articulateness and political instincts to offer his own. He could claim that his policies, like Reagan's, produced prodigious economic growth and that his limited military interventions promoted freedom and democracy. But impeachment cast a pall on his record, and so did September 11: Clinton (like George W. Bush in his first eight months) failed to address what turned out to be a deadly threat.

Bush's version of history is mostly in line with Reagan's. Since Sept. 11, he has led an aggressive policy against foreign enemies, while lowering taxes and pursuing, with considerable success despite narrow Republican majorities, mostly conservative policies at home.

Democratic politicians and the mainstream media, who bridle at the Reagan version and are disappointed that it has not been displaced by Clinton's, regarded Bush's victory in the Florida controversy as illegitimate and have been trying furiously to delegitimize him ever since. So far, this has proved at least as ineffective politically as impeachment was for the Republicans, but the impulse to persist seems irresistible.

How long will this continue? Democrats were used to writing our history in most of the past century. But without a competing vision of their own, they seem no more likely to succeed than Roosevelt's or Reagan's furious opponents.