Just How Crazy are the Dems?
A new poll on 9/11 indicates that they definitely have a paranoia problem
Jonah Goldberg
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-goldberg15may15,0,3962183.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Most fair-minded readers will no doubt take me at my word when I say that a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds.

But, on the off chance that a few cynics won't take my word for it, I offer you data. Rasmussen Reports, the public opinion outfit, recently asked voters whether President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand. The findings? Well, here's how the research firm put it: "Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure."

So, 1 in 3 Democrats believe that Bush was in on it somehow, and a majority of Democrats either believe that Bush knew about the attacks in advance or can't quite make up their minds.

There are only three ways to respond to this finding: It's absolutely true, in which case the paranoid style of American liberalism has reached a fevered crescendo. Or, option B, it's not true and we can stop paying attention to these kinds of polls. Or there's option C — it's a little of both.

My vote is for C. But before we get there, we should work through the ramifications of A and B.



We don't know what kind of motive respondents had in mind for Bush, but the most common version has Bush craftily enabling a terror attack as a way to whip up support for his foreign policy without too many questions.

The problem with rebutting this sort of allegation is that there are too many reasons why it's so stupid. It's like trying to explain to a 4-year-old why Superman isn't real. You can spend all day talking about how kryptonite just wouldn't work that way. Or you can just say, "It's make-believe."

Similarly, why try to explain that it's implausible that Bush was evil enough to let this happen — and clever enough to get away with it — yet incapable either morally or intellectually of doing it again? After all, if he's such a villainous super-genius to have paved the way for 9/11 without getting caught, why stop there? Democrats constantly insinuate that Bush plays politics with terror warnings on the assumption that the higher the terror level, the more support Bush has. Well, a couple of more 9/11s and Dick Cheney will finally be able to get that shiny Bill of Rights shredder he always wanted.

And, if Bush — who Democrats insist is a moron — is clever enough to greenlight one 9/11, why is Iraq such a blunder? Surely a James Bond villain like Bush would just plant some WMD?

No, the right response to the Rosie O'Donnell wing of the Democratic Party is "It's just make-believe." But if they really believe it, then liberals must stop calling themselves the "reality-based" party and stop objecting to the suggestion that they have a problem with being called anti-American. Because when 61% of Democrats polled consider it plausible or certain that the U.S. government would let this happen, well, "blame America first" doesn't really begin to cover it, does it?

So then there's option B — the poll is just wrong. This is quite plausible. Indeed, the poll is surely partly wrong. Many Democrats are probably merely saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they're just answering in a fit of pique. I'm game for option B. But if we're going to throw this poll away, I think liberals need to offer the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to data that are more convenient for them. For example, liberals have been dining out on polls showing that Fox News viewers, or Republicans generally, are more likely to believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Now, however flimsy, tendentious, equivocal or sparse you may think the evidence that Hussein had a hand in 9/11 may be, it's ironclad compared with the nugatory proof that Bush somehow permitted or condoned those attacks.

And then there's option C, which is most assuredly the reality. The poll is partly wrong or misleading, but it's also partly right and accurate. So maybe it's not 1 in 3 Democrats suffering from paranoid delusions. Maybe it's only 1 in 5 , or 1 in 10. In other words, the problem isn't as profound as the poll makes it sound. But that doesn't mean the Democratic Party doesn't have a serious problem.

One Party's Fringe is the Other's Mainstream
By Jeff Jacoby
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/20/one_partys_fringe_is_the_others_mainstream/

If nothing else, Texas Congressman Ron Paul's presidential candidacy makes it clear that the Republican Party is not a monolith. It has its ideological outliers, and they march to the beat of a very different drummer than George Bush and most GOP candidates do.

With his isolationist opposition to the war in Iraq , Paul is the odd man out in his party. To Republican ears, his claim during last week's South Carolina debate that the United States was attacked on Sept. 11 "because . . . we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years" and that Americans ought to "listen to the people who attacked us" was blasphemous. If Rudy Giuliani hadn't pounced on it, one of the other candidates would have.

Most Republicans regard Paul's idea of America's proper role in the world -- stay at home, avoid alliances, and expend no energy making the world safer or protecting human rights -- as eccentric. Invoking Osama bin Laden as the legitimate voice of the Muslim Middle East is the hallmark of a crank, not a conservative. No wonder Giuliani's smackdown was applauded so forcefully.

There was a time, 60 or 70 years ago, when isolationism was respectable in GOP circles. Paul insists that "the party has lost its way" since then and pines for the leadership of Senator Robert A. Taft, who "didn't even want to be in NATO."

But Taft didn't parrot the propaganda of America's enemies. He didn't advise Americans to "listen to the people who attacked us" and do as they demanded. He didn't accuse the United States of provoking Pearl Harbor, or chide President Truman for lacking the "courage" to withdraw US troops in the middle of the Korean War. Ron Paul may fancy himself a latter-day Taft Republican, but by today's standards his foreign-policy views place him among the Dennis Kucinich-Cindy Sheehan Democrats.

Paul helps illustrate what may be the most significant difference between the two major parties today: Republicans who don't take the threat of radical Islam seriously are marginalized. Democrats who don't do so constitute their party's mainstream.

At the Democratic debate on April 26, moderator Brian Williams asked the eight candidates: "Show-of-hands question: Do you believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror?" Only four -- Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Christopher Dodd, and a noticeably hesitant Barack Obama -- raised their hands. Kucinich, John Edwards, Joe Biden, and Mike Gravel did not. Unlike Ron Paul, who holds no important position in the GOP, Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Edwards was his party's vice presidential nominee in 2004. The man who headed the ticket that year, Senator John Kerry, insisted that Islamist terror is merely "a nuisance" that "we're never going to end," like gambling and prostitution.

What explains the Democrats' unwillingness to acknowledge the gravity of the global jihad? In part, it may stem from the sense that Islamists and the left share common foes. George Galloway, the radical antiwar British parliamentarian, declared in 2005 that "the progressive movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies. . . the Muslims and the progressives are on the same side."

But to a large extent, the Democrats' lack of seriousness about the war we are in can only be explained by Bush Derangement Syndrome. The term was coined by commentator Charles Krauthammer, a former psychiatrist, who defines it as "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay, the very existence of George W. Bush."

What if not derangement can explain such fever-swamp nuttiness as the findings of a new Rasmussen poll, which asked whether Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance? Among Democrats, 35 percent believe he did know and another 26 percent weren't sure. Only 39 percent said he didn't. In other words, nearly two out of three Democrats are unwilling to say that Bush wasn't tipped off to 9/11 in advance.

In another poll recently, respondents were asked whether they personally wanted Bush's new security strategy in Iraq to succeed -- not whether they expected it to, but whether they wanted it to. Among Democrats, a stunning 49 percent either hoped that the US plan would fail or couldn't make up their minds.

As long as the 43d president remains in office, a significant number of Americans will be so consumed with Bush-hatred that they will be unable to acknowledge -- let alone defeat -- the real evil that confronts us all. Will they come to their senses after Jan. 20, 2009? And even if they do, will it be too late?