The New "National Security Democrats" Faction: Led By Bums [View All]

[Itsthetruth]

The Dems: Bums
By Matt Taibbi
New York Press
March 29, 2005.

Matt Taibbi lives in New York. He covers politics for Rolling Stone and the New York Press.

With the majority of the public against the war, Democrats have the perfect opportunity to differentiate themselves; so why are they embracing Reaganomics and pre-emptive war? In the United States, a Washington Post/ABC News poll released on March 16 showed that 53 percent of Americans think the Iraq war was not worth fighting, 57 percent disagreed with President Bush's handling of the Iraq war, and 70 percent said that the number of U.S. casualties incurred in the war was unacceptable.

In the midst of all of this, the Democratic Party is preparing its shiny new 2008 position on Iraq and terror. Described in Goldberg's New Yorker article, the political plan is centered around a new faction that calls itself the "National Security Democrats" (a term coined by that famous liberal, Richard Holbrooke) and is led by revolting hair-plug survivor Joe Biden. The position of the "National Security Democrats" is that the party should be "more open to the idea of military action, and even preemption" and that the Democrats should "try to distance themselves from the Party's Post-Vietnam ambivalence about the projection of American power." Additionally, the Democrats ought to reconsider their traditional stance as an opposition party and learn to embrace Republican heroes like Ronald Reagan.

It would be easy to dismiss the Biden revival as a cheap stunt by a discredited party hack with all the national appeal of the streptococcus virus, except for one thing. Biden's "national security" camp includes all four of the expected main contenders for the Democratic nomination – Biden himself, Hillary Clinton, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, and John Edwards. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, another outside contender, is also a member of this camp. We are going to be hearing a lot about "National Security Democrats" in the next three years.

.... the Democratic leaders .... tell 53 percent of the country that they are mistaken, and throw their chips in with the other 47 percent, who incidentally support the other party and are not likely to ever budge. They then go further and try to argue that fighting the war on terror requires abandoning health care, education and Social Security – an idea that, let's face it, makes no fucking sense at all.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21608/