Kos is the Democrat’s Tar Baby

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has an insightful discussion on the issue of the Democrats on national security. Here is how he puts it:


It's tempting to think the omission of national security from both the New York Times and Rahm Emmanuel's presentation is no coincidence. Defense has become the third rail of liberal politics. Touch it and you die. At a time when headlines are dominated by the Iranian nuclear weapons crisis, Hamas' election to Palestinian Authority leadership and a clamor to punish Danish cartoonists for daring to depict Mohammed, it has become imperative to studiously ignore the front page and go straight to the funnies. National defense on the Democratic platform has assumed the status of a black actor in a 1940s movie. It has become the Invisible Man.

There's no percentage in talking about national defense. Attempts to produce a war fighting strategy in the manner of Joseph Lieberman will bring the Kos gang in against you. But taking an explicitly antiwar position is unlikely to play well either, at least with the electorate, as the excerpt above suggests. The only alternative is to deny the existence of any sort of war, except maybe in the fevered imagination of the President; and that if one is discovered to be in progress, it will always be possible to feign surprise and declare the "Democrats will not play second fiddle."

This is the dilemma of the Democrats. Remember that the internet became a major fund raising tool of Howard Dean’s campaign during the primaries leading up to the election of 2004. That was an amazing time and the Democrats seized on it.

Unfortunately, the leading light of the Democrats’ internet effort is the uber-Leftist Markos Moulitsas who created the Daily Kos website. This is currently the gathering place of the most deranged elements of the Left. They have in part created and certainly nurtured a movement that has co-opted a large part of the Democrat party.

It is now the Democrats’ “tar baby.” They have embraced it and depend on it for their most activist members. But having nurtured it and become dependent on it, they have become a captive of it.

There was a revolution in the Democrat party, and the revolution is in the process of liquidating its opposition. It is reminiscent of the Stalinist purge trials when the old revolutionaries who were not sufficiently Stalinist were liquidated. In today’s world, the liquidations are perhaps kindler and gentler, but it appears that they are no less final for the members of the Democrat party.