[Grovenet] Only in your dreams.

[Eric Canon]

Here's a piece from today's Oregonian which tells
about the coming political campaign:

Who's Guilty of 'Petty Partisanship'?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, August 11, 2006; Page A19

Oh my goodness, as Don Rumsfeld might say.
Support for the Iraq war hits a record low, and
all the president's hit men decide that it's time
to smear their opponents as defeatists who give
aid and comfort to the enemy.

Of course they didn't mention the poll on Iraq
released by CNN on Wednesday. As a basis for
their guilt-by-association campaign, they used
the fact that Democratic voters in Tuesday's
Connecticut primary favored antiwar businessman
Ned Lamont over Sen. Joe Lieberman.
	
The gentlemen who have gotten us into a mess in
Iraq prefer not to explain how they'll fix
things. They would rather use national security
for partisan purposes, and they were all out
there on Wednesday, spewing incendiary talking
points. Hey, they may not have sent enough troops
to win a war, but they sure know how to win
midterm elections.

In a telephone call with journalists, Vice
President Cheney came close to suggesting that
there is a new political blog out there called
"al-Qaeda for Ned." His words have not received
nearly the attention they deserve.

Mourning the fact that Democrats would "purge a
man like Joe Lieberman" -- that word "purge" has
a nice Stalinist ring, doesn't it? -- our vice
president went on to say this:

"The thing that's partly disturbing about it is
the fact that, [from] the standpoint of our
adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and
the al-Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on
the proposition that ultimately they can break
the will of the American people in terms of our
ability to stay in the fight and complete the
task."

The rejection of Lieberman made Cheney wonder if
"the dominant view of the Democratic Party" is
"the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we
can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively
engaged in this conflict and be safe here at
home."

Wow! I bet the 145,000 free citizens of
Connecticut who voted for Lamont will be shocked
to learn that they were really sending signals of
"retreat" to "al-Qaeda types."

Then there was Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the
Republican National Committee, handpicked by
President Bush and Karl Rove.

Speaking in Cleveland, Mehlman couldn't resist
starting with a little old-fashioned redbaiting.
He explained Ronald Reagan's defection from the
Democratic Party this way: "He saw the beginning
of the end, as a party that had vowed to fight
communism became a party that set itself against
those who fought communism." Ah, yes, the party
of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale was nothing
but a bunch of anti-anti-communists.

>From there it was an easy leap to saying a
Democratic Party -- cleverly renamed the
"Defeat-ocrat Party" by the RNC chairman -- "that
once stood for strength now stands for retreat
and defeat." Translation: Anyone who dares
question our botched approach is in favor of
surrender.

Finally, from Tony Snow, the White House official
who speaks for the president, came this analysis
of the Connecticut result: "It's a defining
moment for the Democratic Party, whose national
leaders now have made it clear that if you
disagree with the extreme left in their party
they're going to come after you."

This statement is rooted in a lie -- or, to be
polite, fiction. As Adam Nagourney noted in the
New York Times yesterday: "In fact, the vast
majority of Democratic Party leaders supported
Mr. Lieberman in the primary and did not endorse
Mr. Lamont until after the results were in." On
Time.com, Perry Bacon Jr. noted that Lieberman
had the support of "almost the entire Democratic
establishment."

And if being against the Iraq war makes you
"extreme left," then the administration has
succeeded in pushing 60 percent of Americans into
that camp. That's the proportion opposed to the
war in the new CNN poll.

When he announced he was running as an
independent, Lieberman issued a ringing
condemnation of "petty partisanship and angry
vitriol." He denounced those who offered "insults
instead of ideas" and said the purpose of
politics is "to lift up, not to tear down." True,
and there could hardly be any more offensive
examples of petty partisanship than the vitriolic
screeds issued by Cheney, Mehlman and Snow --
coming, as they did, just a day before we learned
of a new terrorist plot against us.

We'll never achieve authentic bipartisanship
until a crowd that has clung to power by dividing
us into bitter camps gets the rebuke it deserves.
In the meantime, Lieberman might usefully send a
copy of his speech to his friends in the White
House. They divide us at our peril.