Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Liberal ankle-biters cry: “He fell off a Segway!”

When Clinton was president, I recall that I was often in a low-simmer seethe, particularly when a new scandal came to light. The travel office, the FBI files lying about, the Marc Rich pardon, the abuse of executive power – repeated transgressions that would darken my mood for several days. But at least there was legal or moral justification for my anger. Democrats today are being driven into paroxysms of outrage because President Bush is doing his job. Their complaints are increasingly incoherent, irrelevant, and transparently peevish.

Take, for example, this inchoate article from the American Prospect’s blog. The author draws a spiderweb-thin comparison between President Bush falling off a Segway and foreign policy: “In any event, it's now clear that Middle Eastern policy isn't the only area in which Bush can be unbalanced from time to time.”

Is that the best you got, buttercup?

Flummoxed by both foreign and domestic successes (Dow’s back over 9000, Donks!), the Democrats are jettisoning reasoned discourse for ever-shriller attacks. Witness this Fox News story: “DNC launches E-mail cartoon lampooning Bush

WASHINGTON — The animation is not all that sharp but the Democrats' message is: President Bush is Dr. Frankenstein and he wants to put a monster on the Supreme Court

And, as James Taranto noted in Best of the Web yesterday, the Dems are on their perpetual search for the next Watergate. With little to work with, they’re trying to widen the definition of Presidential misconduct to include faulty information over WMDs in Iraq:

Of course, no sensible person thinks the Iraq war is Watergate, any more than it was Vietnam. There's no crime here. The complaint seems to be merely that administration officials spoke with too much assurance when they described their beliefs about the present state of Iraq's weapons programs. In other words, they did what politicians always do when trying to win public support for a policy: They made the most compelling argument they could. It's hardly a scandal that the administration didn't make its opponents' case for them.

These mindless attacks on the President are a symptom of a party in disarray. The Democrats are in full arm-flailing mode, scratching for anything to damage the President. What’s next? A condemnation of Bush’s foreign policy because he mispronounces “tiramisu”? Chomp away at those shins, Dems.

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