Personal Asides: Dorothy Parker’s Pale Blue Quips Answered…David Brooks Wrong for Once…The Lieberman Defeat is a Victory for the GOP

Parker.

1. Attending a cocktail party populated by skimpily-dressed starlets desirous of making it big on Broadway or Hollywood. The answer is given by Chuck Johanns in Reader’s Comments. 3. Asked to give an aphorism using the world horticulture. First answer is from Frank Nofsinger, second by Chuck Johanns in Reader’s Comments. With respect to No. 2, no answer as yet. Congratulations winners!

All right: for number two you have this Blog’s permission to use your search engines! First one to communicate here wins.

Brooks.

David Brooks of the New York Times often is right: yesterday he was wrong, mis-led by a self-muddled analysis. To Brooks the defeat of Joe Lieberman means that there are three parties: the Old Guard Republican vis-à-vis Tom DeLay…the McGovernite “peace at any price” party…and what he calls the McCain-Lieberman party (which he designates the party of the future). The Old Guard is ruled only by far-right passions, the McGovernites only by far-left passions…and the McCain Lieberman party by cool rationality. He says the Old Guard is wrong in refusing a tax hike and the McGovernites by refusing to reduce government. Only the McCain-Lieberman people are right as the proper moderates.

One can hope that David Brooks in the future is clearer than this. Joe Lieberman, for all his resolve on Iraq, has been an extreme liberal: on economics, social policy and everything in between. On social policy he made a faint-hearted attempt to cajole Hollywood but backed off and ran with a whimper when the glitterati responded. He has been a backer of partial birth abortion, an issue that evidently doesn’t move David Brooks but which moves the grassroots of the Republican party. McCain, for all his vaunted heroism as a captive, is in politics a kind of illusory fraud. The Republicans would be far better to stand with Newt Gingrich who has a definite philosophy than fall for the charade that McCain puts on. The idea that Lieberman is a kind of martyr who is reminiscent of Scoop Jackson and Hubert Humphrey can go only so far. Neither Jackson nor Humphrey would recognize much in Lieberman were they around today. Your comments?

Lieberman.

The defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut is the best news the Republican party has received in many years…and the photo op of the two over-aged destroyers of civility, Jesse Jackson, Sr. and Al Sharpton should be used by the GOP so often that the image of the two over-the-hill radicals standing behind Ned Lamont burns in the public consciousness. Were Lieberman to have won by a narrow vote, the boil that continues to fester would not have been lanced. Now it is. The crazed wing of the Democratic party has been immeasurably strengthened by Lamont and it will intensify its pressure on Democrats. Hillary Rodham Clinton is in an almost insuperable position because of the Lamont win. Why?

Because she is smart enough to understand that the crazed wing of her party is anathema to the great center of the nation. She has been trying to edge away from it but in order to solidify her base she is going to have to court the left…and by doing so, she will court disaster. As a matter of fact, the party’s left, which once accepted her, is angered at her and may very well make it impossible for her to get the nomination. That would be good because the nomination then would be sent spiraling aloft like jump-ball with the crazies leaping up to grab it. The defeat of Joe Lieberman was short-range good news for only one contender for the Democratic presidential nomination—Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. Feingold is in a superb position to run for president using all the vehement rhetoric he can command. The train is roaring down the track without an engineer. Two things will happen almost immediately.

First, the extreme left will take the Lieberman defeat as signal to press for the impeachment of George W. Bush by a Democratic House. That is as sure as that the leaves will turn golden by the end of the month. A full-blown impeachment cry will so polarize the electorate that the referendum in November will be to continue the war in Iraq without its leader being sacked: a wonderful bonanza for the GOP. Second, the extreme left will kill any chance that Hillary can be nominated. The left will have candidates like Al Gore, Feingold, an even more leftward prone John Kerry and a few others. There will be absolutely no room for a moderate candidate for the presidency in the Democratic party. Lieberman may or may not win as an independent. This Blog hopes that he runs and does not win. The polarization is coming…thank God for it…a polarization that will destroy the Democratic party and which will lead to the formation of another party—if not soon, eventually.

Mark it here: the convulsion caused by the defeat of Joe Lieberman is the best thing that could have happened…for continuation of the struggle in Iraq…for Republican continued control of the House…and for a sober, realistic decision to be made by the Republican party to nominate a leader with ideas and vision who will continue the battle in which we are engaged. And it all began last Tuesday when Lieberman went down the tubes in Connecticut.