Assessing the Electoral Aftermath
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
November 23, 2006
With friends like those who have expressed their approval
of the Democrats' resounding electoral victory last week, does America
need enemies?
Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, for instance, the putative leader
of al Qaeda in Iraq like so many Arab leaders, he also has at least
one alias, in this case Abu Ayyub al-Masri released an audio tape
only two days after the election, something of a record for a prompt response
by terrorists to an international news event.
Indeed, the term "news cycle" among Islamist
enemies of freedom has a slightly different meaning than it does for civilized
people, often, as in the case of Usama bin Laden, spanning many months.
Sister news outlets Al-Jazeera and CNN tend to cut terrorists a good deal
of slack on this issue, treating their invariably tardy news releases
as if timeliness were not an issue.
In the referenced audio tape, al-Muhajir gives his particular
branch of the terrorist group al Qaeda's blessing to the Democrats' victory
in the recent U.S. elections. At the same time, he asserts that al Qaeda
in Iraq currently numbers some 12,000 fighters and that they are achieving
victory at a faster pace than had been anticipated.
He further assures the world that his minions will not
rest until they have (and I think he means this literally, although I'm
sure Democrats would dismiss the inferred menace with a shrug) bombed
the White House. It was not clear if al-Muhajir's threat would hold in
the event we elect a Democrat President in 2008.
Al-Muhajir or al-Masri, if you prefer wasn't
alone among reprobates who approved the Dem victory. Iran's "Supreme
Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the Dems' electoral
triumph was "a victory for Iran." What does that tell you?
The leader of the American insurgency, George W. Bush
who is also known as, uh, George W. Bush has reached out
to Democrats after their electoral victory, in which Dems took control
of both the House and the Senate, and declared his intention to work together
with them to insure that the likes of al-Muhajir would not prevail against
western democracy.
It can be argued that, since al-Muhajir and many other
terrorist leaders have thrown their support behind American Democrats,
Bush may be fighting the same battle in trying to work with Dems as he
is in trying to overcome the terrorist insurgency in Iraq.
In the wake of their electoral victory, Democrats have
been strangely silent in articulating their plan to help America preserve
its status as the champion of democracy in the world. John Murtha was
nowhere to be seen among the Dems celebrating victory on election night.
And in the what-ever-happened-to-Democrats'-commitment-to-diversity
moment of the month, Joe Biden's insistence that we need to partition
Iraq into three regions based on religious and ethnic differences
Kurds, Shiite Muslims, and Sunni Muslims has been met with something
akin to stony silence among those Dems who, oops, now find themselves
charged with actually developing a plan for turning the tide in Iraq rather
than simply bashing, in the nastiest of terms, George W. Bush and the
Republicans who have held congressional power since 1994.
Indeed, it may be that Democrats' greatest worries now
focus on how they can manage what amounts to a potentially volatile coalition,
based not so much on a positive, identifiable agenda as on that flimsiest
of campaign slogans, "Vote for change!" (You'll recall that
what passed for a Democrat platform published earlier this year made no
mention whatsoever of the War in Iraq.)
Add to that the fact that a not-insignificant number of
the newly-elected Democratic majority in both houses are not really classic
leftist Democrats at all, but rather so-called "Blue Dog" Dems,
people who support many conservative positions and espouse conservative
values even though they identify themselves politically as members of
the Democrat Party, and you've got a potentially dicey situation on your
hands, at least if you're a Democrat Party leader trying to hold things
together.
Newly elected North Carolina Democrat Congressman Heath
Shuler, for instance, is a staunch Christian who opposes abortion-on-demand.
And given the fact that he's an ex-NFL quarterback, one would surmise
that Shuler might also, unlike his leftist Democrat cohorts, be pro-military.
Couple that with the resounding defeat in Connecticut
of Democrat Ned Lamont, the poster-boy for Democrat leftism, by staunch
Bush protagonist Joe Lieberman (now an Independent), and the message this
election is sending starts to emerge.
American voters did, in fact, vote for change, but perhaps not the same
change left-leaning Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Ted Kennedy and
Harry Reid and Patrick Leahy and John Conyers might have envisioned.
It can be argued that, rather than abandoning the conservative
values the majority of them hold, Americans actually voted in support
of those values. While it can't be disputed that many of the Republicans
ousted in this election fell simply because they were Republicans, the
fact is that the American electorate reasserted its belief in fundamental
American values.
Republicans had, as Americans saw it, abdicated their
roles as members of the party of smaller government, of fiscal restraint,
of moral rectitude. Knowing full well what their constituencies expected
of them, Republicans nonetheless managed to champion a dramatic increase
in government spending, including the ill-advised Medicare Drug Program,
not to mention the more than 10,000 "earmarks" appended during
the current congressional session to spending bills, the passage of which
without their incurring a Presidential veto arguably confirmed for voters
their Republican legislators' newly-espoused tax-and-spend complicity
and contributed to their electoral rebuff.
Throw into the mix ethical lapses such as those which
resulted in Tom Delay's resignation (never mind that the charges on which
Delay was brought up were trumped up by a politically motivated judge)
and the Jack Abramoff scandal, which almost certainly contributed to Republican
losses of several seats, and you've got the beginnings of an electoral
nightmare.
And don't forget to mention the rather innocuous (in the
grand scheme of things) Tom Foley e-mail "sex scandal," which
in the aggregate managed at least to taint several Republicans but which,
more importantly, served to corroborate in the public's mind the broader
Dem charge of a Republican "culture of corruption," and you've
pretty much completed the picture of an electoral debacle.
Any number of questions emerge after the fact. Why, for
instance, didn't Bush engineer Rummy's resignation in late August? Rumblings
that Rumsfeld had wanted to resign were for more than a year bubbling
just below the surface, long before the election season entered its final
stage. When Rummy repeatedly asserted that he "served at the pleasure
of the President," he wasn't saying that he necessarily wanted to
continue to serve; rather, it appears, he was saying that until this President
comes to his senses and asks for my resignation, I'm stuck in this thankless
job.
In the event, it does seem as if Bush has handed over
the strategic design of the resolution of the Iraq conflict to a committee
of his father's cohorts, including his new Defense Secretary appointee,
Robert Gates. It remains to be seen whether the Democrat-controlled House
and Senate are going to acquiesce to this committee's recommendations
as their anticipated approval of Gates' nomination might seem to
argue or are going to try to cobble together a "strategy"
of their own in its stead.
It does seem, also, that Nancy Pelosi, who will almost
certainly become the new face of the Democrat Party, might be cowering
somewhat at the prospect of her new job duties as House Majority Leader.
While she seems to understand that her party is moving toward the center,
and that the recent vote was not a mandate for radical leftist "San
Francisco" values, she's nonetheless faced with a formidable challenge
in trying to bring together the coalition of interest groups that the
Democrat Party has arguably become.
Her recent smiling photo-ops with the President paint
her as something of a "toady," a cowtowing, perhaps somewhat
intimidated, left-leaning "leader" getting her first taste of
what it means to have a say in "real" power. There's a hell
of a difference beween standing on the sidelines and hurling insults at
the powers-that-be, and actually sitting beside the leader of those "powers"
in the Oval Office and having to contribute something substantial to the
dialogue.
Pelosi's abrupt backtracking on her party's leftist positions
recommending America's immediate withdrawal from Iraq would certainly
seem to indicate that she is at least reconsidering her role. It appears
that it may not be Nancy Pelosi we have to fear so much as it is the other
older entrenched Democrat leftists.
The fact is, ultimately, that Democrats still have no idea whatsoever
who they are or what they stand for. Their 2006 electoral "victories"
may in fact prove to be their undoing. The foundation members from
Teddy Kennedy to Patrick Leahy to Charles Schumer to Charley Rangel to
John Conyers of their arguably fragile "coalition" represent
at best a pale remnant of leftist Democrats' once vigorous socialist past.
You may recall, for instance, that in 1986, as a member
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Leahy leaked classified documents
about a proposed military action against Libya on the grounds that he
thought the proposed operation was "the most ridiculous thing I had
seen." His actions caused the U.S. military to have to cancel the
planned covert military strike against Libya.
But where Leahy's demonstrably anti-American, anti-democratic
actions some two decades ago may have once been cited as stellar examples
of internal resistance to America's global imperialism, today they can
be seen as the actions of a misguided, not to say anti-patriotic, leftist
activist against America's interests and in support of the cause of terrorism.
(Leahy, by the way, was forced in 1987 to resign his position as Vice-Chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee following an investigation that revealed
a pattern on his part of other similar anti-American activities.)
The problem is, of course, that Leahy is still around,
and he has not changed his anti-American, pro-terrorist tune. He has promised
that he will, as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee a position
he's due to assume in January as a consequence of the Democrat majority
in the Senate continue to work to insure that America's defenses
against terrorist activity are weakened by, for example, vowing to see
that the monitoring of cell phone calls from known terrorists to American
citizens will only be possible if warrants have been granted in advance.
The Democrat Party has long resembled a big house where
the parents are away for the weekend. Nor have Dems done anything recently
to demonstrate that the parents have returned, that they're suddenly somehow
mature enough to take on the daunting task of making policy in a world
where western democracy is under direct attack.
Indeed, their responses to the threat of Islamist terrorism
have on the whole been remarkably naive and childlike. Said responses
have been characterized by the idea that you can actually negotiate in
good faith with terrorists. Indeed, if former President Clinton's forays
into international diplomacy are any example, Dems tend to send children
including, for example, Madeleine Albright and Jimmy Carter
out to do adults' work.
It remains to be seen whether Democrats, no longer under
the gun of being on the outside looking in, will somehow manage to find
within themselves the character and substance necessary to deal meaningfully
with the very real threat posed by Islamist terrorists to western democratic
ideals, ideals that Democrats themselves have supported in, at best, lukewarm
and halfhearted ways.
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