Coming on top of Z-man's final scene in this life and the formation of an
Iraqi Cabinet at long last, the president's lightning visit to Baghdad was
another piece of good news in a war that has been full of the bad kind. No
wonder the loyal opposition seemed nonplused for a moment. It's had bad news
to exploit for so long it may not know how to respond to the occasional ray
of sunshine.
Back in Washington, the president's critics were dealt another blow when
Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel investigating the Scooter
Libby-Valerie Plame-Joe Wilson imbroglio, let it be known that he did not
plan to indict Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, in
connection with that mess.
Whew. You could almost hear the sigh of relief
emanating from the White House, and imagine the chagrin among the Daily Kos
and MoveOn.org crowd. W.'s more rabid critics had a name for the festive day
to come when the special prosecutor would surely indict Karl Rove for
something or maybe everything: Fitzmas. It rhymes with Christmas. But now
the dream of a subpoena-wielding Santa Claus arriving with a bag full of
indictments turns out to be only a dream. Aw shucks.
The theory is that Democrats are going to ride a wave of anti-Bush sentiment
into the midterm elections and emerge, as the Republicans did in the
watershed year 1994, in control of both houses of Congress. The reality is
that Democrats remain Democrats, that is, divided. And divisiveness is the
sure way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
John Kerry, the party's presidential nominee in 2004, is no longer talking
about how to win in Iraq but proposing to withdraw most of our troops by
year's end. Hillary Clinton is arguing against a precipitate withdrawal, so
naturally she's booed and jeered by the party's zealots for taking so
unspeakably responsible a position.
It looks like deja vu all over again, specifically 1968, when the Democratic
Party came apart at its riotous convention in Chicago, where the streets
seemed evenly divided between obnoxious hippies and brutal cops. That
convention accomplished the impossible: It made Richard Nixon look like the
respectable, responsible choice for president of the United States. Are the
Democrats about to destroy themselves again, or will they ever learn?