On Neal Horsley’s Triumphant Return to the Air Waves.

……………….

Howard Dean: It’s hard to know what to make. None of us outside the administration have access to the intelligence, which led to this determination.

I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. His whole campaign is based on the notion that “I can keep you safe, therefore at times of difficulty for America stick with me,” and then out comes Tom Ridge.

It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there’s some of both in it.

Joseph Lieberman: I don’t think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.

(Note: If I wanted to, I could throw up John Kerry largely concurring with Lieberman, though not as forthrightly.)

The recent statements by Tom Ridge pretty well prove Dean correct in this old war of words. Lieberman’s a douche-bag, but we already knew that.

With that, we can look back into some feel-good rhetoric from Matthew Yglesias, along the lines of (I can’t find the quote immediately), “The ‘moveon.org’ crowd and the DLC crowd disagree vehemently on the War in Iraq and… that’s about it.”

For his part, Yglesias’s mea culpa with the War in Iraq went like this: I was bamboozled because I didn’t want to think of myself as reflexively anti-Bush; I wanted to be smarter and more thoughtful than the anti-war crowd. It was a telling commentary to be sur… politisc as self-image.

I will point out that Howard Dean was a DLC poster child at one time — a fact that maybe doesn’t matter anymore since the DLC clearly distanced itself from him in 2004. The point beyond that being that the difference between Dean and Lieberman in the matter of the color codes — and that weird doo-hingle with Iraq that ensnared Kerry — is pretty stark and more telling than any supposed similarity with respect to — say — Social Security. One opinion shows a deference to power and a key role-making in narrowing acceptable discourse to suit said ambiguosly floating power. The other is willing to go out on a limb and — I might add — not afraid to be correct for the sake of being correct against a backdrop of Universal Deceit.

This works its way into other matters. Take Lieberman’s duplicity on the Bankruptcy Reform Bill. Dare I say: he voted for the bill before he voted against it.

The word on the street these days is that the DLC is a dead institution. Nakedly exposed, a point of reference to which Centrist Democrats are running away from to find their way to a different banner (say, for instance, the “New Democratic Network”)– one not propped up by the same Charles Koch money that props up various right-wing, libertarian, and generally corporatist Political Institutions.

The latest issue of the New Republic includes an article defending “Clintonism”. I skimmed through it, and have not read it. I assume it has some good points to make — few New Republic articles of the last half dozen years are completely devoid of value. Something needed to defeat the Democratic Party of the 1970s and something needed to win in the early 1990s. BUT…

I started jotting down items for a blog entry… a rambling and list of supposed proposed “Democratic Party Platform” Initiatives. Something beyond a A Party of No or the more egregious “Party of Me Too”, addressing the great problem of the Democratic Party: a lack of definition. Items inspired by various actions and initiatives of various Democratic politicos, others by the excesses of the RNC at the moment. Nothing strikes me as radical in the least, or utopian, or sectarian / special interesty in its grasp, or outside the mainstream of average American opinion. Odd props to Jay Inslee, Peter DeFazio, Warren Buffett, Eliot Spitzer, and Brian Schweitzer.

But then I squint my eye. It needles various corporate coffers just enough to keep them honest. Which is why they tend to float around the ether, bounced around by Democratic officials and never framed into a cohesive storyline. The National Democratic Party platforms from 1988 onward shall remain as bland and blurry as can be.

What are you going to do about it?

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