This Michael Barone article has a great quotation from Joseph Lieberman:
"There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq
seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist
extremism," Sen. Joseph Lieberman said in a speech last week. What is
profoundly wrong is that too many of us are operating off the default
assumption and have lost sight of who our real enemies are."
4 comments:
I couldn't agree more. While many Democrats are surely guilty of this, doesn't Bush bear a significant amount of the blame? I remember the 2002 election, when many Republicans used the War on Terror as a partisan cudgel. It seems to me, that the Republican use of foreign policy helped poison the political atmosphere. I will admit that far too many Dems whose irrational hatred of Bush obscures their vision, but this administration bears some significant responsibility for this reality.
I would say the atmosphere was already poisoned. The irrational hatred of Bush predated 2002.
That might be true, but it does not make President Bush right to campaign against Democrats who supported the war in 2002, nor does it make him right not to make any sort of effort to create a bipartisan war cabinet. If he wanted politics to stop at the water's edge in time of war, he should have led by example, regardless of irrational hatred.
The "irrational hatred" probably began with right-wing hatred of Clinton, and in any case in the wake of 9/11 Bush had a great opportunity to mobilize bipartisan support. It is ahistorical to assert that views of Bush have simple been constant with no variation. Views of Bush in 2001, say, and in 2006 became dramatically different.
dcat
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