It can. In a May graduation speech, The Times' publisher - arrested twice during the 1960s in protests against the American enterprise in Vietnam - boasted, "My fellow students and I ended the Vietnam War and ousted President Nixon." Who's to say he, through The Times, is not still at it - trying to get the U.S. out of Iraq and cripple President Bush?

But what does all this have to do with the Democrats?

It's ammunition for them to fire at the Republicans and the administration, but they don't seem to be blasting away with a coherent strategy. Fresh on the heels of the death of al-Zarqawi and the beheading of two captured American soldiers, the Democrats' Great Debate on the American presence in Iraq produced these numbers in the Senate: 6 Democratic votes on a measure to pull out all American forces by January 1; 12 Democratic votes and 1 independent vote for the Kerry-Feingold bill to pull out within a year; and 37 Democratic votes - plus 1 independent vote and 1 Republican vote - for the Levin-Reed resolution to begin pulling troops out sometime this year, with no timetable for completion.

The vast right-wing conspiracy must be alive and well.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist saw the Democratic measures as far less than forthcoming - even "intentionally misleading": "They don't use such terms as 'retreat' or 'withdrawal,' but instead call for 'redeployment' of our armed forces from Iraq. . . . (It would dishonor U.S. forces,) to say nothing of their fallen comrades, to cut and run at a time as promising as now."

"Cut and run" - how fair is that usage?

It's the usage of John Kerry himself. In December 2003, he said he feared that "in the run-up to the 2004 election, the (Bush) administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy. Their sudden embrace of accelerated Iraqification and American troop withdrawal dates, without adequate stability, is an invitation to failure. The hard work of rebuilding Iraq must not be dictated by the schedule of the next American election."

At least, as Hillary Clinton has said ("We're not blindly united like the other side is"), the Democratic debate demonstrates the health of the Democratic Party.

That's one way to look at it. Another way, from out here in the bleachers, is to see the Democrats' failure to formulate a unified message as a measure of Democratic disarray - and corresponding good news for the Republicans.