Let's Be More Republican
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Oh, now this is a plan. Out Bush Bush. What idiot came up with this idea?
Jackson Diehl needs to be reminded that the Democrats tried that on the 2002
Iraq war resolution and it didn't turn out so well. Hey, but that doesn't stop
people from pimping the notion that if at first you fail miserably, keep trying
until you've completely discredited the very notion of an opposition. Enter
Will Marshall
and Jeremy Rosner and the gang that can't talk straight.
Mr. Diehl talks about “reclaiming the Democratic Agenda,” citing the ideas of
the Truman-Kennedy foreign policy focus, which is the promotion of democracy,
bear any burden idea. What Diehl doesn't do is respect their histories. I know
quite a bit about John F. Kennedy, having done massive research for a political
show I launched last year. “Bear any burden” doesn't have any resemblance
whatsoever to what Bush and the Republicans did on Iraq. Standing up and saying
Me Too! on whopping foreign policy failures is not a way to reclaim the John F.
Kennedy legacy. It's a way to make a mockery of it. After all, after J.F.K.
lived through the Bay of Pigs debacle, which was hoisted on him by the CIA and
Ike, he never bought into this type of warfare again. In fact, he was readying
to pull out of Vietnam… oh, never mind, let's not fight that one again.
But just listening to Diehl talk, reading his words that is, you'd think he'd never read a word of John
F. Kennedy. Well, I have. Reams of stuff and more I haven't shared as sourcing.
What Jackson writes today is pure junk. I don't want to argue about Kennedy's
legacy, but when you have Bush using it in vain and people like Diehl flatly
misstating it, a cursory glance has got to be undertaken. J.F.K. said things
like “World peace, like community peace, does not require that each
man love his neighbor—it requires that they live together in mutual tolerance,
submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.” However,
one of the most striking things about Kennedy was that long before our eyes
were turned toward the Middle East, even before he was president, J.F.K. understood
that nationalistic passions of the people of those countries would come to affect
our nation greatly. It led him to utter ideas like the core of our Middle
Eastern policy is (or should be) not the export of arms or the show of armed
might but the export of ideas. That's not a quote, but a paraphrasing of
his ideas.
So, when people like Diehl trumpet some nonsense of “reclaiming the Democratic
Agenda,” he evidently doesn't take the time to examine that history.
Though you'd never know it from surfing the Internet, there exists in the
Democratic Party a substantial body of politicians and policymakers who believe
the U.S. mission in Iraq must be sustained until it succeeds; who want to
intensify American attempts to spread democracy in the greater Middle East;
and who think that the Army needs to be expanded to fight a long war against
Islamic extremism.Their problem isn't only that some people (mostly Republicans and independents)
don't believe they exist. Or that the flamers at MoveOn.org would expel them
from the party if that were possible. They also face the formidable task of
rescuing what they believe is a quintessentially Democratic policy agenda
from the wreckage of the Bush administration, so that a future president can
do it right.
It's as if he's interpreting Truman's dropping of the bomb as tacit approval
for Bush's low yield nuke programs, if only by inference. Like when Bush talks
about J.F.K., which during election 2004 had Carolyn Kennedy Schlossberg asking
that he not. But the worst thing about Diehl's “reclaiming the Democratic agenda” is that there's no there there, as Matthew Yglesias states flatly today, to which I agree. It's not about matching Bush's Republican “stay the course” nonsense with a response of ditto for Dems!
Reclaiming the democratic agenda is not about being more Republican. It's being
strong enough in the actual details of foreign policy and the history of countries and regions to know the difference between
a lethal clear and present danger, as opposed to a concocted war mongering program
that is not in the best interest of America, the Middle East or the world. John F. Kennedy knew the difference.
The people trumpeting “With All
Our Might” evidently do not.
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