Democrats to Undergo Spine Transplants

Like Zell Miller (A National Party No More) and millions more JFK and Scoop Jackson Democrats, I bemoaned the loss of backbone in the grand old Party. (See for example Mommy Party, 11/30/05; In Loco Parentis, 12/8/05; Kennedy of Camelot, 5/4/06) Larry Elder perfectly expressed my feelings for the Democratic Party when he said: I don’t like you cause you’re gonna get me killed. My mission became to keep them (the Dems) from winning the Commander-in-Chief derby (the Presidency).

Today I discovered, to my delight, that the Party is not totally devoid of spine. There are more than one Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party. Jacob Heilbrunn writes in the LA Times: Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to beef up the military and won't run from a fight.

Now two new books are making the case for liberal hawkishness. The liberal New Republic Editor Peter Beinart has written The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. As Beinart puts it, whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought. Hooray!!

And the Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall has just released a volume of doctrine called With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty. Democratic scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program insisting upon human rights monitoring in the Middle East. Freedom, they exhort, is the fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror and oppression. Does this sound like the Bush Doctrine? Huh?

Heilbrunn continues: This new crop of liberal hawks calls for expanding the existing war against terrorism, beefing up the military and promoting democracy around the globe while avoiding the anti-civil liberties excesses of the Bush administration. They support a U.S. government that would seek multilateral consensus before acting abroad, but one that is not scared to use force when necessary.

Darn!, this is great (expanding the war on terrorism)except for the part about civil liberties excesses - A large majority of Americans want the wire tapping and data mining to continue; and the multilateral consensus – unless they mean the coalition of the willing that Bush went with.

But Heilbrunn warns that such hawkish rhetoric will lead to an internecine Democratic war. The Moveon.org types, not to mention the party's congressional leadership, are hardly prepared to go down without a fight.

In Connecticut, the left is targeting Senator Joe Lieberman for political extinction because of his pro-war views. Antiwar candidate Ned Lamont captured a third of the delegates at the state's Democratic convention, thus winning the right to challenge Mr. Lieberman in an August primary. That's a remarkable showing against a three-term incumbent who as recently as 2000 was on the party's national ticket and ran for President in 2004. The left's larger goal is to turn the Democratic Party solidly against the war on terror, and especially against its Iraq and Iran fronts.

Mr. Lamont's performance will be noticed by Democratic Presidential hopefuls Al Gore and John Kerry, who are already maneuvering to get to Hillary Clinton's antiwar left. It will be amusing to see the three of them avoiding the spine transplant clinic while Virginia Democratic Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack sign up for theirs.