Tasting Victory, Liberals Instead Have a Food Fight
(Washington Post. Requires registration. I’ve tried to include the most relevant bits below.)
Even the Washington Post can see that when Hugo Chavez’s latest squeeze, Cindy Sheehan, and Saddam Hussein defense attorney Ramsey Clark get together to promote “The Impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.” no one besides John Kerry is likely to take them seriously.
They were headliners at a teach-in/love-in/putsch-parody/rally yesterday at the aptly nominated Busboys & Poets restaurant and bookshop in Washington, D.C.
One David Swanson, a labor union official who runs “Impeach PAC”, asked
“Does the Democratic Party want to continue to exist or does it want to ignore what 85 percent of its supporters want?”
Swanson must have meant 85% of the 10% of Americans who comprise the extreme left and who support Democrats as long as Democrats perpetrate disingenous filibusters.
Since associating with such stupidity as will be revealed following, would cost Democrats far more votes than that, Mr. Swanson is either stupid and/or innumerate. I’d go for the former, based on further evidence:
After the participants made their urgent calls for impeachment proceedings, John Bruhns, identifying himself as an antiwar Iraq veteran, rose for a clarification. If Democrats don’t first “gain control of one of the houses” of Congress, he wondered, “how else can we impeach this monster?”
Swanson had a ready brushoff for Democrats who won’t pursue impeachment because they’re in the minority: “Just go home if you’re going to talk that way.” Offering the lessons of 1994, he said: “The way the Republicans got the majority was not by being scared. . . . It was by going out and speaking on behalf of their base and letting themselves be called radicals.”
He actually meant to say simply that “Republicans won elections”, but as a member of the “reality-based community” he continues to regard this as metaphysically unacceptable.
If being called “radicals” (a polite term for Cindy Sheehan or Ramsay Clark) were all it took, there would be 99 Democrat Senators keeping Bernie Sanders company in the Senate chamber while watching re-runs of the Bork confirmation hearings.
No, Republicans didn’t win by making themselves look any more like fools than they actually are, though if you’re going to do so I suppose you may as well say it’s on purpose.
Some of them even know it:
When one of the impeachment forum’s sponsors posted an item on its Web site about news coverage of the event, a reader responded that, without conservative support, “this becomes a cartoon image of the old pinko commie left, and fair game for the wingnuts at Fox.”
The only trouble is, that it is not a cartoon and Ramsay Clark is indeed the “old pinko commie left.” Cindy Sheehan is probably not smart enough to be the “new pinko commie left”, but her keepers still think she might challenge Senator Diane Feinstein in the next primary election.
None of this is going to stop these people from banging pots and pans together tonight in protest against the State of the Union speech, however. And Fox, if no one else, will probably show us some video of it. Maybe Ramsay Clark will get a tambourine.
Ramsay Clark, in addition to his current gig as one of Saddam Hussein’s defense lawyers, is a former United States Attorney General.
Clark, on a stage decorated with portraits of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr., said the administration is “the greatest threat to peace, to human rights, to economic justice worldwide.” The former attorney general proposed a 75 percent cut in the military budget and complained that Democrats are just as warmongering as Republicans.
That may attract a major contribution from George Soros, but it is fortunately unlikely to help any Democrat outside of the San Francisco Bay area actually win an election.
Electoral success is not an issue, though:.
“I’ve heard a lot about accountability” from the panel, said one questioner. “Seems to me the first opportunity we had for accountability was in the last election.”
“Elections,” moderator [Kevin] Zeese replied, “are not the determining factor.”
That explains why they have no use for them in Iraq, either, I suppose.