If Saddam had been joined by Congressional Democrats on the barricades in Fortress Baghdad, the 3rd Division would be calling for reinforcements to take the city. Stonewall Daschle, Black Jack "Pershing" Kerry, Ted "Stalingrad" Kennedy, Nancy "the 'Frisco Enforcer" Pelosi and the rest of the last-ditch Democratic gang may be wrongheaded, but they are tough as nails. They would have put a little steel in the spine of Saddam's Republican Guard. Our own domestic Senate Republican Guard better be prepared for a grinding, often seemingly pointless, war of attrition on the floor and in the corridors of the Senate between now and November 2004. Not until after the election will the surviving Democrats likely decide to play the part of Syria, and learn from recent experience to be more cooperative with President Bush. Which is a long way of saying that following the swift and heroic war leadership of the president, his supporters should brace themselves for a year and half of legislative disappointments.
The Democratic Party leadership is in a strange mental place right at the moment. Their activist base, big contributors and major party interests are more deeply misaligned with the American public than at any time since 1972. Just consider what Harold Meyerson, the editor of the liberal American Prospect, wrote in the Washington Post yesterday about the Democratic presidential race: " ... for labor's constituents -- as for those of every major institutional player in the Democrat's orbit -- the Bush presidency has proved an unmitigated disaster, so defeating Bush trumps every other consideration. 'This will be one of the least ideological battles that we -- the party's institutional powers -- have ever had,' said a (big labor) consultant." Mr. Meyerson went on to characterize the Democratic Party activists' view on the Iraq war as "a kind of exasperated ambivalence." Let me emphasize, Mr. Meyerson is one of the leading intellectual gurus of the Democratic Party -- he's their friend. He knows them well, and, it is my sense, he has got their mood about right.
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
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