The "peace" Democrats are back. It's a dream come true for Karl Rove.

[CatWoman]

I'll bet if I stubbed my toe, some in the media will spin it as a "plus" for Karl Rove :eyes:



August 7, 2006
11:30am BY MARTIN PERETZ
Monday, August 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Finally, the contest in Connecticut tomorrow is about two views of the world. Mr. Lamont's view is that there are very few antagonists whom we cannot mollify or conciliate. Let's call this process by its correct name: appeasement. The Greenwich entrepreneur might call it "incentivization." Mr. Lieberman's view is that there are actually enemies who, intoxicated by millennial delusions, are not open to rational and reciprocal arbitration. Why should they be? After all, they inhabit a universe of inevitability, rather like Nazis and communists, but with a religious overgloss. Such armed doctrines, in Mr. Lieberman's view, need to be confronted and overwhelmed.

Almost every Democrat feels obliged to offer fraternal solidarity to Israel, and Mr. Lamont is no exception. But here, too, he blithely assumes that the Palestinians could be easily conciliated. All that it would have needed was President Bush's attention. Mr. Lamont has repeated the accusation, disproved by the "road map" and Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza, that Mr. Bush paid little or even no attention to the festering conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. And has Mr. Lamont noticed that the Palestinians are now ruled, and by their own choice, by Hamas? Is Hamas, too, just a few good arguments away from peace?

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008760

[CatWoman]

1. from today's War Room on this article:

Marty Peretz and the fringe pro-war movement
On most issues of political significance, the national pundit class settles on some banal line of conventional wisdom which its most slothful members mindlessly recite on television and in print. Yesterday, the incomparably conventional Cokie Roberts illustrated that syndrome when she used her time on ABC's This Week to claim that the defeat of Joe Lieberman would be -- all together now -- "a disaster for the Democratic Party" because it would be "pushing the party to the left."

Following right along, New Republic Publisher Marty Peretz went to the Op-Ed page of the Wall St. Journal this morning and unleashed one political cliche after the next in order make the same point. According to Peretz, Lamont is the new George McGovern and is part of "Karl Rove's dream team." Lamont's candidacy "means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party." To illustrate the frightening elements of radicalism behind this political threat, Peretz invokes "Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters" -- and only them -- and then darkly warns that if Lamont and "others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly."

It is nothing short of surreal to listen to pundits like Roberts and Peretz insist that opposition to the Iraq war will doom the Democratic Party. For more than a year, poll after poll (.pdf) has demonstrated that a solid majority of Americans oppose this war and believe it was a mistake. It is due primarily to this deep and still-growing anti-war sentiment that George Bush's presidency has all but collapsed, sending his approval ratings to near historic lows.

For that reason, Peretz copies the bizarre method used by almost every pundit who wants to equate a Lamont victory with doomsday for the Democrats. That is, he devotes his entire column to a purported discussion of the politics of the Iraq war without ever once mentioning or even alluding to the most significant fact: what the American electorate thinks about the war. The reason for that omission is self-evident. Americans have decisively turned against the war which neoconservative warriors like Peretz gave us and which Beltway pundits like Roberts enabled -- a fact which these pro-war commentators intently and astoundingly just ignore.

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/

[OnionPatch]

8. Yes, and we thought

the emergence of the fringe radicals (the Christian fundamentalists) would drag down the Republican party, too, but look who's in power.

They're afraid that the Democrats will get some real values and the backbone to stand behind them.

[grytpype]

2. Yeah, because war is really popular now.

The public just can't get enough war. The Repugs have given them years and years of war and it has just whetted their appetites for more. So they are looking for candidates who will promise more war, and there are the stupid Dems with their "wait a goddamn minute" message. Ha ha fucking ha.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. And just who is Marty Peretz?

Why, he's the editor in chief of that ever-so-precious-and-liberal The New Republic.

[bryant69]

4. I'm pretty sure the Wall Street Journal Opinion Page

wants Democrats to be Conservative. I mean they want everybody to be conservative, given the choice.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[Marr]

5. Lieberman scores another endorsement from another

right-wing blowhard.

[Tesha]

6. Ahh, an unbiased commentator fer shure!

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0903/peretz_2003_09_08.php3

Time to show that Jewish blood is not cheap and
those who shed it will pay a tremendous price

By Martin Peretz

The defeat of terror takes overwhelming force, and only Israel itself can provide it. Indeed, only Israel should.

At the end of a century of unthinkably cruel and ultimately empty revolutions —
Nazism, communism — Israel stands virtually alone in the right to assert that,
after the crackup of empires and rage for popular sovereignties, it is a success,
and a decent one at that.

Now envision Israel in its actual neighborhood — the tyrannical societies of the
Middle East made even more twisted by corrupting and unproductive oil wealth —
and you have a standing reproach to the Arab hubris that lies to itself.

From the western Sahara to the deserts abutting the Persian Gulf, not a single
regime beyond Israel has so much as even embarked, or allowed its entrepreneurs
to embark, on the exacting beginnings of industrial advance. This wide swath of
terrain on which a quarter of a billion people live produces with all its hands
and brains just about what little Finland or Spain does. Remind yourself also
that not one ruler across the region governs by consent of the ruled. Evoke the
phantoms of lost grandeur put in the heads of miserable boys and girls by dogma
and dogmatics.

<more>

[madame defarge]

7. Haven't we learned anything in 5 1/2 years???

Everything that happens is spun to be a benefit for this administration. No matter what it is, they will spin, spin, spin it all to make it seem as if it's to their advantage. It's their way of mind control & brainwashing.

I've also noticed that they're spinning a lot more frequently now. My conclusion: they're scared shitless.

[kentuck]

9. Written by someone still stuck in 1972...

As if the times and circumstances are the same. They are not.

[madfloridian]

10. He's the TNR editor who doesn't like Kerry or Dean among others.

I don't know what others he has gone after. He let that magazine become a right wing tool, and now the DLC is giving out year subscriptions to their members.