Rove speech exposes fundamental split

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9-11 in the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9-11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9-11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban. In the wake of 9-11, the liberals believed it was time to submit a petition." So spoke White House presidential advisor Karl Rove to New York's Conservative Party last week.

Not surprisingly, some politicians generally classed as liberals took umbrage. New York's Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that they and most other Democratic elected officials reacted to the Sept. 11 attacks with outrage and voted for the resolution authorizing military action in Afghanistan. Only one member of Congress, Berkeley left-winger Barbara Lee, voted against it.

In the liberal narrative, the Democratic Party selflessly supported George W. Bush until he unwisely decided to make war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And indeed many of them supported that: Schumer and Clinton voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002.

Reading the initial press accounts of Rove's speech, I wished that he had been more specific about which liberals he was denouncing -- except that, as those press accounts failed to mention, he was. "I'm not joking," he went on immediately after the words quoted above. "Submitting a petition was precisely what Moveon.org, then known as 9-11peace.org did. You may have seen it in The New York Times or The Washington Post, the San Francisco Examiner or the L.A. Times. (Funny, I didn't see it in the Amarillo Globe News.) It was a petition that 'implored the powers that be' to 'use moderation and restraint in responding to the terrorist attacks against the United States.'"

One reason that the Democrats are squawking so much about Rove's attack on "liberals" is that he has put the focus on a fundamental split in the Democratic Party -- a split among its politicians and its voters.

On the one hand, there are those who believe that this is a fundamentally good country and want to see success in Iraq. On the other hand, there are those who believe this is a fundamentally bad country and want more than anything else to see George W. Bush fail.

Those who do not think this split is real should consult the responses to pollster Scott Rasmussen's question last year. About two-thirds of Americans agreed that the United States is a fair and decent country. Virtually all Bush voters agreed. Kerry voters were split down the middle.

This is a fundamental split. University and media elites, as Thomas Sowell writes in his forthcoming "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," promote a version of history in which all evils are perpetrated by the United States and the West and in which Third World tyrants are assumed to be the voice of virtuous victims. These elites fail to notice that slavery was a universal institution until opposed only by altruists in the West, in late 18th century Britain and 19th century America.

It comes naturally to those liberal politicians whose worldview is set by these elites to suppose that Saddam's Iraq was the land of happy kite-flyers portrayed in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and that, as Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin said in a carefully prepared speech, American actions in Guantanamo are comparable to acts of the Nazis, Soviets and Khmer Rouge.

It comes naturally to Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean to proclaim that Saddam Hussein should be presumed innocent pending trial but that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay should be consigned to jail for offenses with which he has not even been charged.

Half the Senate Democrats attended the Washington premiere of Moore's movie and laughed and cheered its ridicule of Bush and denunciation of American policy -- at a time when Moore proclaimed on his website that "Americans are the stupidest people in the world."

Now, Democrats want to make Guantanamo an issue when, according to Rasmussen, only 20 percent of Americans believe prisoners there are treated unfairly and only 14 percent believe that treatment is similar to Nazi tactics.

Durbin has now apologized, sort of. And Democrats are watching with glee as Bush's job approval stays stuck below 50 percent. But a party that happily allies itself with the likes of moveon.org and many of whose leading members have lost the ability to distinguish between opposition to an incumbent administration and rooting for our nation's enemies has got serious problems. Especially when it is called on again, as it will be sooner or later, to govern.

The Rove Kerfuffle

Democrats have met the enemy, and it is Karl Rove. After standing behind Dick Durbin's comparison of American troops to Nazis, Washington Dems are in a lather about the White House deputy chief of staff's comments at a dinner last week. Here's what Rove said (ellipses in original):

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to . . . submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what Moveon.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be" to "use moderation and restraint in responding to the . . . terrorist attacks against the United States."

I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt as I watched the Twin Towers crumble to the earth; a side of the Pentagon destroyed; and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.

Moderation and restraint is not what I felt--and moderation and restraint is not what was called for. It was a moment to summon our national will--and to brandish steel.

MoveOn.org, Michael Moore and Howard Dean may not have agreed with this, but the American people did. Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: We will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: We must understand our enemies.

Rove's detractors offer two chief criticisms. The first is that Rove is overgeneralizing--that there are some liberals who are serious about the war. There is, for example, Sen. Joe Lieberman. Another example would be, um--hmmm . . . oh, did we mention Joe Lieberman? You see what we mean: This is a quibble.

The second criticism is that Rove is lumping together mainstream liberals with far-left nut-jobs like MoveOn.org, which did indeed start a petition, and Michael Moore, whose response on Sept. 12, 2001, was to lament that al Qaeda had attacked Democratic states instead of Republican ones.

Not for nothing did Andrew Sullivan famously warn on Sept. 16 that "the decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts . . . may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." Yet elected Democrats by and large did not respond this way in the weeks after 9/11, as John Kerry recalled in an e-mail to supporters the other day:

That, of course, is what is most outrageous about Karl Rove's claim that President Bush's political opponents offered "therapy and understanding for our attackers." It isn't true. In the days after 9/11, there were no Democrats, no Republicans. We were all Americans, standing together. President Bush acknowledged that unity in a clear and compelling way at the time.

"One of the overlooked aspects of the war we are now fighting is the awakening it has spawned on the left," Sullivan wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 4, 2001:

In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very long while, many liberals are reassessing--quietly for the most part--their alliance with the anti-American, anticapitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or supported.

But the mainstream liberals proved far from steadfast, as Sullivan noted in a blog entry on March 13, 2002 (ellipsis in original):

THE ANTI-WAR DEMOCRATS: They're not exactly shouting from the rooftops. But they sure have their wetted fingers hoisted in the air. Janet Reno says in Florida that "I have trouble with a war that has no endgame and I have trouble with a war that generates so many concerns about individual liberties." Notice she doesn't say that the war has violated individual liberties, or that she believes that, but merely that there are "so many concerns" about it. Has there been any war in which such concerns have not been raised?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch also reports that "the former U.S. attorney general said she thinks the government would be hard-pressed to find a legal basis to prosecute many of the Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners being detained at Guantanamo Bay." Oh, let them go, then. Back to Sandy Berger and letting bin Laden escape from Sudan to Afghanistan. Do these people ever learn?

And then there's Senator John Kerry. As a Vietnam vet, he'll be the front man for those Democrats desperate to dispel the war atmosphere that could realign American politics away from dovish liberals for decades. Senator Hillary Clinton spelled out the formula in Boston at a Kerry fund-raiser: "John's leadership is critical to where we plan to go in this world. We need people of the stature and the experience of John Kerry . . . asking the hard questions. We are having the debate Congress is required to have--where to go, what to do."

Like most things Senator Clinton says, this is unobjectionable on its face. But its intent is clear. Some Democrats are simply uncomfortable about America having a strong and unapologetic role in the world. This isn't treason; it's weakness. And weakness in the dangerous world we face is an invitation for more terror. Be warned.

This is more or less the same as what Rove said last week--and Sullivan's observations came barely six months after 9/11, before the Democrats did these among many other things:

* Made MoveOn.org a center of their grass-roots political effort and a frequent speaking venue for former and current Democratic officials, including Al Gore, Robert Byrd and Harry Reid.

* Embraced Michael Moore, giving him an honored seat at the party convention in Boston last July. When Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11"--surely the crassest effort to politicize the attacks--had its Washington premiere, many Democrats showed up, including the party's then-chairman, Terry McAuliffe, and its then-Senate leader, Tom Daschle. "There might be half of the Democratic Senate here," then-senator Bob Graham of Florida observed.

* Nominated for president a man who opportunistically opposed the liberation of Iraq after having voted for it (or opportunistically voted for it before opposing it, or both), and who cast a protest vote against funding the troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

* Made a whole host of statements that reflect precisely the attitude Rove imputes to them--from Sen. Patty Murray's description of Osama bin Laden as a philanthropist who builds, among other things, "day care centers" to Sen. Dick Durbin's Nazi calumny. GayPatriot has a list.

It seems clear that the rupture between the "decadent left" and the mainstream of the Democratic Party was short-lived, and that the latter has largely made its peace with the former, whether out of conviction or out of base-assuaging political necessity. In any case, if Democrats and liberals don't like being portrayed as weak, let them show some strength. Whining about Rove's remarks is not an auspicious start.

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