ApparatChick

Sad, hollow men

Mark Steyn, as usual, is pretty and apt: "These sad hollow men may yet get their way -- which is to say they may succeed in persuading the American people that a remarkable victory in the Middle East is in fact a humiliating defeat."

This sort of happened already in Vietnam; we hadn't won, but we were winning until the whole Winter Soldier thing. John Kerry's most enduring foreign policy contribution.

But I digress. One of his other points is "while the media were eager to promote Murtha as the most incisively insightful military expert on the planet, this guy Lieberman's evidently some nobody no one need pay any attention to. ... It must be awful lonely being Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Party these days." Um, yeah, I can imagine that. I really think that Joe Lieberman will be the next Zell Miller. After the education bill, I began thinking that Bush wouold drive the country to the right; he would seduce the ignorant moderates into a moderately conservative voting block, and he would drive pure-hearted but previously passionless conservatives to find true conservative alternatives. The country is spinning to the right because of Bush, but it was unintentional, I'm sure. It's drifting right by default; the left has been so vehemently, viscerally opposed to Bush that, in the course of driving themselves deranged, they have catapaulted themselves leftward; even old school liberals look "right" by comparison. Unfortunately, this hasn't resulted in the GOP and affiliates getting more conservative and I think ultimately it's not going to be a big help in any kind of rightward drift to moderates; they may vote "R" for celebrated liberal mavericks like McCain and Guiliani and Hagel, but they won't be attracted to conservatives like Santorum or Coburn the way they were to Reagan and even Goldwater.

Traditional liberals like Lieberman may soon find themselves men without a country as the Democratic party whirls into insanity; the GOP may be there to pick them off. I'd hoped for a bigger, righter tent; still doesn't get me quite where I was hoping.

posted by Deon @ 9:11 PM