November 11, 2007
The Politics of National Security III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST Alexander Burns’s response to Senator Lieberman’s speech is to quote the “centrist Democrat” Ed Kilgore. I haven’t the faintest idea how centrist Mr. Kilgore is, although even a centrist Democrat is pretty far left these days, especially with presidential primaries coming up and given the need to appeal to the Moveon.org tail that now so wags the Democratic dog. But the website on which he posted (The Democratic Strategist) is an explicitly partisan Democratic one. “The Democratic Strategist will be clearly focused on developing political strategies for promoting Democratic candidates and issues.” Therefore his job was to criticize Senator Lieberman, not to consider the worth of his argument. He proceeds to criticize in the usual fashion of partisan Democrats: We’re right, everyone else is wrong. Q.E.D. Mr. Burns quotes him as follows: “You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” I must have been napping. When exactly did the Republicans aggressively reject the rule of law, human rights, and bipartisanship? Was it at the same time they were aggressively rejecting Mom and apple pie?
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