thedrifter
05-22-06, 06:42 AM
Days of Rage
John McCain and Joe Lieberman feel the wrath of the antiwar left.
Monday, May 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Two events last Friday speak volumes about the direction of modern liberal politics, and it's not an encouraging trend, especially if you're a Democrat who wants to take back the White House.
The first is that antiwar candidate Ned Lamont captured a third of the delegates at Connecticut's Democratic Party convention, thus winning the right to challenge Senator Joe Lieberman in an August primary. The second is the nasty treatment of Senator John McCain by faculty and students during his commencement address at the New School in New York.
Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited.
"The Senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," said senior Jean Sara Rohe, which makes us wonder what ideals, and manners, she learned at home. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."
Speaking of "havoc," Ms. Rohe spoke only blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The Senator who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton reacted with admirable restraint to these insults, and readers who want to see his remarks can find them posted here.
Mr. McCain was invited to the New School by its president, former Democratic Senator and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Robert Kerrey. When Mr. Kerrey spoke, he was also heckled, with someone shouting, "You're a war criminal!" It'd be comforting to dismiss all this as mere Manhattan derangement, but these passions have become common in liberal media and Web precincts and are spilling into national politics.
Take Connecticut, where the left is targeting Mr. Lieberman for political extinction because of his pro-war views. Their vehicle is Mr. Lamont, a rich Greenwich businessman who decided to run after the Senator wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal supporting U.S. policy in Iraq. Mr. Lamont--who was featured in our Weekend Interview on May 13--needed 15% of the delegates to get a place on the primary ballot, but in the event rolled up 33%.
That's a remarkable showing against a three-term incumbent who as recently as 2000 was on the party's national ticket and ran for President in 2004. "They are saying this war was a mistake and bring the troops home," Mr. Lamont declared. Mr. Lieberman will still be favored to win the primary, but angry-left activists around the country will now descend on the state and the fight may well turn vicious.
The left's larger goal is to turn the Democratic Party solidly against the war on terror, and especially against its Iraq and Iran fronts. Mr. Lamont's performance will be noticed by Democratic Presidential hopefuls, some of whom (Al Gore, John Kerry) are already maneuvering to get to Hillary Rodham Clinton's antiwar left. Well before 2008, this passion will also drive sentiment among Democrats on Capitol Hill. If they recapture either the House or the Senate this fall, a legislative drive to withdraw from Iraq cannot be ruled out.
We doubt all of this will help Democrats with the larger electorate, which whatever its doubts about Iraq does not want a precipitous surrender. Americans haven't trusted a liberal Democrat with the White House during wartime since Vietnam, which is when the seeds of the current antiwar rage were planted. The great mistake that leading Democrats and anti-Communist liberals made during Vietnam was not speaking up against a left that was demanding retreat and sneering at our war heroes. Will any Democrat speak up now?
Ellie
John McCain and Joe Lieberman feel the wrath of the antiwar left.
Monday, May 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
Two events last Friday speak volumes about the direction of modern liberal politics, and it's not an encouraging trend, especially if you're a Democrat who wants to take back the White House.
The first is that antiwar candidate Ned Lamont captured a third of the delegates at Connecticut's Democratic Party convention, thus winning the right to challenge Senator Joe Lieberman in an August primary. The second is the nasty treatment of Senator John McCain by faculty and students during his commencement address at the New School in New York.
Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited.
"The Senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," said senior Jean Sara Rohe, which makes us wonder what ideals, and manners, she learned at home. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."
Speaking of "havoc," Ms. Rohe spoke only blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. The Senator who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton reacted with admirable restraint to these insults, and readers who want to see his remarks can find them posted here.
Mr. McCain was invited to the New School by its president, former Democratic Senator and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Robert Kerrey. When Mr. Kerrey spoke, he was also heckled, with someone shouting, "You're a war criminal!" It'd be comforting to dismiss all this as mere Manhattan derangement, but these passions have become common in liberal media and Web precincts and are spilling into national politics.
Take Connecticut, where the left is targeting Mr. Lieberman for political extinction because of his pro-war views. Their vehicle is Mr. Lamont, a rich Greenwich businessman who decided to run after the Senator wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal supporting U.S. policy in Iraq. Mr. Lamont--who was featured in our Weekend Interview on May 13--needed 15% of the delegates to get a place on the primary ballot, but in the event rolled up 33%.
That's a remarkable showing against a three-term incumbent who as recently as 2000 was on the party's national ticket and ran for President in 2004. "They are saying this war was a mistake and bring the troops home," Mr. Lamont declared. Mr. Lieberman will still be favored to win the primary, but angry-left activists around the country will now descend on the state and the fight may well turn vicious.
The left's larger goal is to turn the Democratic Party solidly against the war on terror, and especially against its Iraq and Iran fronts. Mr. Lamont's performance will be noticed by Democratic Presidential hopefuls, some of whom (Al Gore, John Kerry) are already maneuvering to get to Hillary Rodham Clinton's antiwar left. Well before 2008, this passion will also drive sentiment among Democrats on Capitol Hill. If they recapture either the House or the Senate this fall, a legislative drive to withdraw from Iraq cannot be ruled out.
We doubt all of this will help Democrats with the larger electorate, which whatever its doubts about Iraq does not want a precipitous surrender. Americans haven't trusted a liberal Democrat with the White House during wartime since Vietnam, which is when the seeds of the current antiwar rage were planted. The great mistake that leading Democrats and anti-Communist liberals made during Vietnam was not speaking up against a left that was demanding retreat and sneering at our war heroes. Will any Democrat speak up now?
Ellie