THE DEMOCRATS LOSE IN 2008

I'm taking a moment during a conference in St. Louis to blog...and if my mentor, Margaret Kimberley, is correct, we'd better take out the DLC NOW, or else face losing again in 2008. Her article, which I've cut and pasted here, speaks volumes and sends a timely warning to all of us.


On Wednesday, November 5, 2008, newspaper headlines will tell us that the Republican presidential candidate has defeated the Democrat. It is generally ill advised to make predictions about an electoral outcome, especially three years in advance. It is less dangerous to do so where the Democratic Party is concerned.

The winner may be Jeb Bush, or it may be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Don’t worry about who the Republican victor will be. Just know that the Democratic Party is once again on the road to Loserville.

Amazingly, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) still holds sway. Despite the fact that their strategy has kept the House of Representatives in Republican hands for the last ten years, despite the loss of the Senate and two presidential elections, they are still a force to be reckoned with.

Most losers eventually figure out that they should just shut up and disappear, but not our friends at the DLC. They keep on talking, under the bizarre premise that if they just keep doing what they have been doing they will get a different result. Yes, that is a definition of insanity.
Right after Election Day 2004, Al From, founder of the august organization, told us all who was to blame for John Kerry’s loss. The evildoer was none other than film maker Michael Moore.
“We need to be the party of Harry Truman and John Kennedy, not Michael Moore,” Al From and his buddy Bruce Reed frothed in the Wall Street Journal, soon after the election.
“So let the glitterati in Hollywood and Cannes fawn over Michael Moore; Democrats should have no truck with the rancid anti-Americanism of the conspiracy-mongering left," wrote Will Marshall, December 13, in the DLC’s online organ, NDOL.org.

From and Reed returned to Moore-bashing in the same issue: “We must leave no doubt that Michael Moore neither represents nor defines our party.”

The problem wasn’t with their candidate, a man who hesitated to fight back when attacked by liars. It wasn’t the man who so muddled his message on Iraq that many voters couldn’t tell how or if his policies would have differed from Bush’s. Michael Moore, who unlike From played no role in the loser’s campaign, was to blame.

From said nothing about the vote theft in Ohio, the missing voting machines and discarded provisional ballots. He said nothing about electronic vote fraud. He wouldn’t even admit that he and his friends backed the wrong horse.

Not content to obsess over Michael Moore, the DLC folks are still keeping us in shock and awe. In a memo entitled “What We Stand For” we get wisdom like this:
”Let's not kid ourselves: Americans didn't have any trouble telling the difference between John Kerry and George W. Bush. The trouble they had was figuring out what our side stood for.”

It isn’t clear if they need lessons in logic or in grammar. Americans had a lot of trouble telling the difference between Kerry and Bush. That is why many of them chose not to change a horse in midstream. They know quite well that the Democrats don’t stand for much of anything.
Nowhere in the tepid “What We Stand For” manifesto does Al From mention Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats. The states of Georgia and Indiana are on the verge of passing legislation mandating that voters present photo identification at polling places. Does the DLC stand for voting rights or is it like Senator Kerry, unwilling to take a stand and speak up for millions of disenfranchised Americans?

In keeping with the twilight zone thinking of the DLC, From even manages to get in his digs at Howard Dean. Dean, who like Michael Moore wasn’t the candidate. Dean is still not safe from DLC attacks. From has the gall to lecture Dean with a snide bit of advice. “First do no harm.” Did From ever have similar smart ass words for mega loser Terry McAuliffe? It doesn’t matter that the Democratic plight worsened under former Democratic National Committee Chairman McAuliffe's watch. He was one of From’s pals. Apparently that is all that counts with the party that elevates losing to a cult status.

From isn’t the only DLCer who knows the sure road to a concession speech. Senator Evan Bayh, who dreams of running for president himself, has penned a tome that tells Democrats nothing of any use:

We, therefore, urge you to oppose calls to withdraw troops from Iraq prematurely, before the new Iraqi government is able to consolidate its authority and defend itself against Sunni insurgents and foreign terrorists.”

What a joke. Bayh and friends saw too many propaganda photos of Iraqis with ink on their fingers and immediately took a dive. The mess in Iraq is all of America’s making. Every problem from starving kids, to Iraqis under detention, to Halliburton’s no bid contracts, is the direct result of U.S. intervention. The so-called insurgents wouldn’t have anything to fight about if their nation wasn’t occupied by foreign armies.

Not to be outdone with foolish thinking, the losers in the making have even come up with a foolish name for themselves: national security Democrats. Perhaps they think it will have the same success as “compassionate conservative.” At any rate, the national security Democrats have a strategy that amounts to being a poor man’s Republican. They all think that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. They won’t say so, but they maintain that Saddam had to go and the absence of WMD was an intelligence problem and not an outright lie. “They say that the absence of weapons of mass destruction was more a failure of intelligence than a matter of outright deception by the Administration,” wrote Jeffrey Goldberg of the “national security Democrats” in the March 14 issue of The New Yorker.

It is hard to imagine. A political party catches its lying opposition red handed and refuses to use the evidence. How pathetic.

In 2008 you can celebrate a February 29th birthday, or watch beach volleyball at the Olympics. Do whatever you like, but don’t get caught up in another year long trail of tears to November. Unless a lot changes between now and then, the national security Democrats will be blaming Michael Moore after their concession speech on November 5th.

Like I said, the DLC can't get a well-funded person elected dog catcher, as evidenced by losing both houses of Congress with their spiel. Now, repeat after me: "The DLC are losers, the DLC are losers..."

If we repeat it enough, maybe we'll start to really believe they are truly losers and consign them to the Republicans, since that's their true aspirations anyway...