Surely,
at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided
such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others,
they wildly applauded President Bush's statement that Congress
failed to pass Social Security reform last year.
As the party
of reactionary inertia -- as the party that not only doesn't have
any solutions to today's dangers and problems but denies that
such problems exist -- the Democrats on the floor of the House
Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its
new, disfunctional self.
The Democrats'
wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely
tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about
them.
If one recalls,
last year, the official position of the Democratic Party was not
only that they opposed President Bush's Social Security reform,
they argued there was no crisis -- no major problem that required
rectification.
(In fact,
Social Security has $4 trillion of unfunded liability, and if
major changes are not made quickly, we will only be able to pay
the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised
benefits.)
Social Security
is the single most iconic Democratic Party issue of the past hundred
years -- the Democrats created Social Security in 1935, and have
won countless elections since then by beating up Republicans for
allegedly not supporting it. It was the Democratic Party's sacred
virgin. They would lie for it, die for it, steal for it, demagogue
for it -- but never cheer its demise or harm, even sarcastically.
Their collective
decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for
sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic
shame for the Democratic Party.
Worse than
that for the Democrats, it shows how severely degraded their political
instincts have become. Tip O'Neil's Democratic Party of 20 years
ago would never have cheered the failure of Social Security --
even to try to make a small political point. To be sure, they
would demagogue the issue ruthlessly, but never be seen to be
walking away from the sacred program.
Until George
Bush became president, the Democrats, for better and for worse,
were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president,
the Democrats have become a nihilist party.
It is one
thing to oppose one's opponent's policies. After all, Benjamin
Disraeli, the founder of the modern British Tory Party, once famously
observed that the job of an opposition party is to oppose. But
he also said they should oppose but not obstruct. And while in
the minority he carefully proposed policies he would implement
when his party came into power.
But today's
Democrats largely refuse to even admit that the problems President
Bush is trying to solve even exist. They offer nothing. And this
mentality was also on display Tuesday night in Congress. On most
of the president's major pronouncements regarding our war against
radical Islam, the Democrats sat on their hands.
Or, in the
case of Hillary Clinton when a non-response was politically impossible,
she would, with an icy look that could freeze a furnace, applaud
in a slow, robotic, menacing manner. Woe betide the object of
that frigid esteem. On Iraq, on Iran, on intercepting terrorist
communications, they have no positive proposals for success.
President
Bush caught the essence of today's Democratic Party in a rather
elegant double epigram: "Hindsight alone is not wisdom, And
second-guessing is not a strategy."
I wouldn't
be surprised to see that thought become the strategic negative
communication theme for the Republican Party this campaign season.
That is the trouble with being a rotten tomato-throwing member
of the bleacher crowd. One may develop a small following amongst
one's fellow complainers, but no large group of people are going
to ask you to come out and lead the team.
But not
satisfied to be a head in the sand, reflexively negative opposition
party, an increasing number of Democrats and their supporters
in the leftish fever swamps have started calling for President
Bush's impeachment.
While I
haven't seen any polls yet on the subject, I would guess that
something less than 10 percent of the American voting public would
look forward to seeing the last two years of the Bush presidency
consumed with a Democratic Party-controlled Congress trying to
impeach the president during a time of war.
Somehow
the Democratic Party -- for 180 years the most electorally successful
political party on the planet -- has now almost completely mutated
into a party too loathsome to be seen in public, and too nihilistic
to be trusted with control of even a single branch of government.
