Rove and Libermann's Parallel Universe

Here is Karl Rove and Joe Lieberman's alternate reality.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010843

The list of Congress's failures grows each month. No energy bill. No action on health care. No action on the mortgage crisis. No immigration reform. No progress on renewing No Child Left Behind. Precious little action on judges and not enough on reducing trade barriers. Congress has not done its work. And these failures will have consequences.

Democrats had a moment after the 2006 election, but now that moment has passed. They've squandered it. They have demonstrated both the inability and unwillingness to govern. Instead, after more than a decade in the congressional minority, they reflexively look for short-term partisan advantage and attempt to appease the party's most strident fringe. Now that Democrats have the reins of congressional power, their true colors are coming out and the public doesn't like what it sees.

The Democratic victory in 2006 was narrow. They won the House by 85,961 votes out of over 80 million cast and the Senate by a mere 3,562 out of over 62 million cast. A party that wins control by that narrow margin can quickly see its fortunes reversed when it fails to act responsibly, fails to fulfill its promises, and fails to lead.

The president has made it clear that he will veto every bill that comes his way, not in its merits but to preserve what remains of his base. While the Democratic veto was narrow, if anything, the political trends remains strongly in the Democrat's favor with the death toll of our troops at record highs. Also at record highs: the price of gold, oil, hatred for the president's policies, and foreclosures.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f8eee44-8e67-11dc-8591-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

In his most outspoken attack on fellow Democrats since he was unsuccessfully challenged last year by Ned Lamont, a liberal Democrat, for his Senate seat in Connecticut, Mr Lieberman yesterday said he might not vote for the Democratic presidential nominee next year.
He argued that George W. Bush and the Republican presidential candidates remained truer than the Democratic party to its tradition of a "moral, internationalist, liberal and hawkish" foreign policy that was established by presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.

"The Democratic party I grew up in was unafraid to make moral judgments about the world beyond our borders," he said.

"[Today's Democrats] are inclined to see international problems as a result of America's engagement with the world and are viscerally opposed to the use of force - the polar opposite to the self-confident and idealistic nationalism of the party I grew up in."

Did Lieberman sleep through the Viet Nam war era? It says much for our upside down values that preemptive war is somehow an act of moral self-confidence and idealistic nationalism. At present, because the Democratic party's control of the Senate rests on a single person, Lieberman's power is at its height. But, if he really had the courage of his convictions, why doesn't he declare that he is a Republican? In the short term, he would lose seniority as a Democrat and thus key committee positions. In the long run, he can see like everyone except for Rove that the Democratic Party will gain Senate in 2008, this reducing the need for the rest of the party to pander to Lieberman. But I wish Lieberman would switch to the Grand Old Party as he is a Democrat only in the same sense that Hitler was a Christian-- but self-assertion only.