Caught In A Time Trap...

If this is real, and I don't think there is any reason why it isn't, then the Democrats have two major problems.


1) The party is now completely beholden to historical revisionism. When the Democratic Congress bowed - not to public opinion, but rather to their left-wing who was claiming to make that public opinion - out of financing the South Vietnamese, in the middle of the largest armored assault since the Battle of Kursk in WW2, they abrogated the responsibility that the US held to South Vietnam. Those are the historical facts. To claim that Iraq is the same as Vietnam is to ignore the massive differences, not the least of which is the lack of a heavily financed sanctuary for the OpFor. If anything, the ONLY similiarity between the two is that US forces are there fighting: not even the forces are the same (draft vs. volunteer), and that US troops are dying.

2) The attempt to create historical parallels between Nixon and Bush. There are parallels? Nixon, let us remember, left office one step ahead of an impeachment because he authorized his political operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in order to dig up dirt he could use against the Democrats and to learn their strategy before they took it public. Is Dean accusing Bush of doing this? No: he is accusing Bush of not telling the truth and when it did, of tellling it selectively in order to go to war. I don't have the time or the inclination to tell y'all how wrong this is: suffice to say that this is hairsplitting at the very best and designed not to find out the truth of the matter, but rather to abdicate responsibility for their actions.

Why are these problems?

Because the Democrats are caught in a time trap. Their formative years, the cognitive parameters that they operate within, is focused almost exclusively on Vietnam and Watergate. They have become victims of their own mythology, propogated so long over time that there is no critical thought left within the party. They are nothing without these two events: that is why they cannot but return to their own mythology about both eras.

And the key point is that the Democrats - and I speak here of the party as a whole, not individual 'crats - are worse than irresponsible: they are actively and deliberately abdicating their responsibility for their actions by claiming that they would've could've should've instead of bearing their responsibility. It is the abdication of an entire political party for their actions in the past.

And it fits into the pattern of the abandonment of the South Vietnamese in the face of a massive attack from the North. And to do what Dean wants to do is nothing less than the abdication of the responsibility of the US to give the Iraqis the chance to get out of the hell that was Iraq for the last 30 years. That is the responsibility that the US took on when it toppled the former regime.

And abdicating that responsibility would make it impossible for anyone in the region, if not the world, to take the US seriously. If that is what the Democrats want: let them say it . But instead they will simply try to attempt to recreate their mythology instead

All I hear is crickets.