In today's New York Times, Bob Herbert says Democrats are in need of "a moxie transplant." Herbert writes:

I have no more patience with this perennially pathetic patient, this terminally timid Democrat who continues to lie cowering and trembling on the analyst's couch, wondering why the Demolition Derby Republicans control virtually all of the levers of power in the United States.

Herbert's column is particularly interesting in that he wants Democrats to be more vocally antiwar and to rail against the Bush administration's "monstrous buildup of state power" that has "undermined the freedom and privacy of innocent people," and yet he chooses to cite President Harry S. Truman as a model for Democrats to emulate.

Let's count the ways this is ironic. First, as a Senator from Missouri, Truman supported FDR's scheme to pack the Supreme Court. As President, of course, Truman is most well known for making the exceedingly difficult and courageous decision to drop the bomb on Japan in 1945. Twice. He also ordered the invasion of Korea in 1950 to repel communist aggression, igniting a limited war which dragged on for three years and cost more than 33,000 U.S. lives. In 1952, Truman established the NSA. That was also the same year he ordered the seizure of American steel mills, an act which the Supreme Court later declared had exceeded Truman's constitutional authority.

Herbert laments that "there are no Trumans in sight in this Democratic Party." No kidding, because hardcore antiwar liberals like Herbert have driven them from the ranks. Truman believed in a muscular, assertive foreign policy that has long since fallen out of vogue with members of the post-Vietnam Democratic party. The truth is that if Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman were alive today, Bob Herbert would skin him alive in the pages of the New York Times.