Mr. Caddell noted that Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s victory demonstrates it did not have to be this way. Despite his loss in the Democratic primary, the Connecticut senator ran as an independent on a platform that unapologetically rejected cutting-and-running from Iraq. He offered his constituents a well-reasoned, and accurate, assessment of the larger war we are in and the implications for it of our loss of Iraq. As Mr. Caddell sees it, the failure of too many Republican Party leaders and candidates to do as Joe Lieberman did and “put the country first” out of a belief that “they could rely on getting out the vote and the hell with the issues” has led to our present pass.
The longtime Democratic operative’s rage is particularly intense because he knows the sort of people to whom our future security is now being entrusted. He expressed deep concern that Nancy Pelosi would be, as Speaker of the House, two heartbeats away from the presidency, saying she is someone who is no more prepared to be Commander-in-Chief than he would be to serve as an astronaut on a lunar mission.
Evidence of just how ill-suited Rep. Pelosi is for any position of responsibility for national security has become manifestly evident even before she has become Speaker. She campaigned aggressively for Jack Murtha to become the House Majority Leader. Although the most vociferous champion of swift abandonment of Iraq was overwhelmingly rejected for that post by the Democratic caucus, Mrs. Pelosi will make him the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee – from which he will be able to do immense harm to the war effort.
Worse yet, as Pat Caddell pointed out, the Speaker-elect is intent on entrusting to Rep. Alcee Hastings the chairmanship of what many Americans regard as the House panel with the greatest responsibility for our security at the moment, the Intelligence Committee. Democrat Caddell observed that this is frightening on several grounds. To do so, Mrs. Pelosi had to reject the more-senior Rep. Jane Harman, ostensibly because she had not been sufficiently partisan in her role as ranking minority member.
She will also have to ignore the fact that in a previous incarnation, then-Judge Hastings abused a very valuable intelligence tool – wiretaps – by ordering them on Mafia figures and then selling transcripts to the subjects of the surveillance. Mr. Caddell caustically recalled that a Democrat-controlled House impeached the judge for this crime by a vote of 403-3 and a Democrat-controlled Senate convicted him by a vote of 69-23.
Pat Caddell is right that the Republican failure during the campaign to frame the national security issue properly – including the horrifying prospect of a Hastings chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee – is substantially responsible for the fact that there will be an acute lack of security-minded leadership in the 110th Congress. Already, our enemies have taken heart from this turn of events. Worse yet, the lack of adult supervision raises real concern as eminences of both parties call for negotiations with them and their appeasement via sacrifice of Israel’s security.
The way ahead is for Republicans to join forces with sensible Democrats like Pat Caddell on a robust, bipartisan national security plan for waging the War for the Free World. Ben Franklin’s famous warning was never more true: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.”