This Is Excellent News For the Republican Party

In comments, America's most dangerous professor directs us to this Jacob Weisberg classic, which puts his comments about Hillary's excessively ambitious and calculated iPod and how it spells doom for the Democrat Party in the relevant context. Even if you haven't read it, you know the argument: unnamed and uncited war opponents "appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously," which we can tell because for some mysterious reason they don't see the invasion of a country that posed no security threat to the United States and had no substantial relationship with anti-American terrorism as a logical part of a response to 9/11. And, most importantly, the acceptable boundaries of foreign policy discourse are established by Jacob Weisberg (and such boundaries can never involve opposing even the most misguided war when it matters, and also always seem to mean that nobody else is opposing the war in the right way even if it's gone so badly that nobody can defend it.) All of which leads to this highly convincing argument about why Ned Lamont's victory means that the Democrat party is doomed, doomed, especially if they nominate an anti-war candidate like Barack Obama:

In a similar way, the 2006 Connecticut primary points to the growing influence within the party of leftists unmoved by the fight against global jihad. Nixon had the gift of hippie demonstrators and fellow-traveling bluebloods like Ned's great uncle Corliss Lamont as antagonists. Today's Republicans face an anti-war movement with a different tone and style, including an electronic counterculture of enraged bloggers and callow entrepreneurs like Ned himself. Yet the underlying political dynamic is not altogether different.

Whether Democrats can avoid playing their Vietnam video to the end depends on their ability to project military and diplomatic toughness in place of the elitism and anti-war purity represented in 2004 by Howard Dean and now by Ned Lamont. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for 2008, is trying to walk this difficult line, continuing to express support for the war in principle while becoming increasingly strident in her criticism of its execution. As the congressional elections approach, many Republican candidates are fleeing Bush's embrace because of his Iraq-induced unpopularity. But Lamont's victory points to a way in which Bush's disastrous war could turn into an even bigger liability for the Democrats.

I think we can all agree that the disastrous failure of the Bush presidency was excellent news for Republicans. After all, I created a playlist for Howard Dean on Pandora and a Jewel cover of "The Bewlay Brothers" came up, and...well, must I paint you a picture? It's all deeply connected with the demise of the Democrat Party in ways you hippies could never understand.

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