Six years after 9/11 Jonah Goldberg reminds us that if he had written on 9/12 that six years later a Democratic presidential candidate would be “ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker” or that “a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11” they would have called him mad.
But, Goldberg writes, George Bush must take some of the blame for the Democrats’ checking out of the war on terror.
Bush lacked the political imagination to keep the Democrats within the tent.
This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker... That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.
But has any president ever united the country for a great struggle unless the danger was up close and personal? Isolationists were active right up to the day of Pearl Harbor, and Democrats checked out of the Cold War half way through.
The fact is that the Democrats are on board in practice. The Democratic candidates are playing to the Angry Left right now but they know that the American people expect them to deal with terrorism. But they are afraid to actually implement a withdrawal from Iraq, at least in a way that advertises their responsibility.
The only way that the Democratic base will come inside the tent is through an utter collapse and discrediting of their secular religion. But the whole point about a religion is that it is a closed system. It is a program for living that is based on faith and not upon empirical verification. (And that goes for Richard Dawkins too).
The best way to bring the Democrats inside the tent is to give them the presidency. Then we’ll find that the only problem Democrats had with the war on terror was that President Bush was in charge.
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