The Left has its own problems

Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post:

. . .I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents' dinner.

Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 -- a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley ("You wouldn't know funny if it slapped you in the face") and ended with Ron ("Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER") who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you're a genius.

[Snip]

But the message in this case truly is the medium. The e-mails pulse in my queue, emanating raw hatred. This spells trouble -- not for Bush or, in 2008, the next GOP presidential candidate, but for Democrats. The anger festering on the Democratic left will be taken out on the Democratic middle. (Watch out, Hillary!) I have seen this anger before -- back in the Vietnam War era. That's when the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party helped elect Richard Nixon. In this way, they managed to prolong the very war they so hated.

Mr. Cohen hits on something here. Those of us on the right are so focused on the problems of the Republican Party that we can fail to notice that the Democrats have their own problems.

At the center of the Democrats difficulty is the fact that the very center of their party, the "base", is insane. These are people without whom they cannot win; however they cannot satisfy them without turning off centrist swing voters.

Think about it; you have a group of people who have been pushed so deeply into a kind of political psychosis, call it Bush Derangement Syndrome if you like, that they sound like the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat. I mean these are people who think that Cindy Sheehan makes sense. And I don't mean the sanitized Cindy of the mainstream media. I mean the unfiltered Cindy, crazy anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and praise for Stalinist dictators and all. These people go to a Michael Moore movie and come out thinking that they have just stared into the blazing sun of truth.

For the Republican Party to be in an equivalent place they would have to be unelectable without the support of robed Klansmen and swastika waving skinheads.

So whatever is the Jackass party to do? President Bush's low poll numbers are the result of conservatives being angry with him. Democrats have always hated him. When his numbers were at their highest after 9/11 it wasn't because the Dean Brigades turned to him in their hour of fear. It was because the majority of this nation who define themselves as conservative stood behind him.

That conservative majority is still standing in exactly the same place as always. The President, unfortunately, has scampered off to the left. In search of. . . something. The favor of Vicente Fox, the chimera of a future Republican majority built on newly legalized wetbacks? I don't really know.

What I do know is that the bulk of the people who voted for George W Bush because they believed that he was the man to lead the nation to victory in the Global War on Terror will not turn around and vote for the party of surrender just because the President has turned out to be a disappointment on one issue.

Even if it is a critically important issue.

George Bush will not even be on the ballot in ’06 or ’08.