Nat'l Security Democrats: "We'll Fuck Things Up Just as Badly"

From King of Zembla. Matt Taibbi smells a horrible odor emanating from certain Democrats:

"Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. I would say to John, 'Let me put it to you this way. The Lord Almighty, or Allah, whoever, if he came to every kitchen table in America and said, "Look, I have a Faustian bargain for you, you choose. I will guarantee to you that I will end all terror threats against the United States within the year, but in return for that there will be no help for education, no help for Social Security, no help for health care." What do you do?' My answer is that seventy-five per cent of the American people would buy that bargain."

—Joe Biden, in The New Yorker, on what he would say to John Kerry

"Look, the answer is, we have to do an unbranding. We have to brand more effectively. It's marketing."

—Kerry, in the same piece, on the Democrats' need to sell themselves as tough

Around the same time Joe Biden was selling New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Goldberg on the idea that the only hope for the Democratic Party was to abandon all social programming and invade the planet, some interesting polls were taken in the three countries most involved in the Iraq invasion.

What do the polls show? Support Bush, Blair, and Howard has dropped like a lead ingot. Duh...

Yet the response, at least from some Democrats, is to make sure their toe is firmly in place between said ingot and the ground below:

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 senator 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 party leadership's persistent and bizarre campaign of self-condemnation and Republican bootlicking is one of those things that, on its face, makes very little logical sense. It makes cultural sense; we have come to expect that the cultural figures we call the Democrats will respond to electoral failure first by sniveling and finger-pointing, and then by puffing up their chests and telling their dates they know how to handle themselves in a bar fight. From the Republicans we expect just the opposite; beaten at the polls, they immediately start cozying up to snake-handlers and gun freaks and denouncing school lunches as socialism. It is impossible to imagine a Newt Gingrich responding, say, to LBJ's Great Society by concocting its own expensive plan to feed the poor black man—but we fully expect that a Democrat who loses an election will suddenly start to reconsider his opposition to preemptive invasion and Reaganomics.

I can't, for the life of me, understand why any of these folks would adopt such a position--the lesson of Iraq is as subtle as a sledgehammer between the eyes to ANYONE who's bothered to look at more than a local news broadcast. And that's the model for the future? Jeez.