The Unhinged: Friday Files

Matthew Yglesias from the American Prospect would like to explain a couple of things to us.

Shhh, let's listen in...

THE LIBERAL HAWKS' LAMENT.

On a related note, I find the sort of self-pity of hawkish Democrats reflected in this post from Marshall Wittman a bit baffling:

The Moose would readily sign up for the Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ and Scoop. Alas, it doesn't exist and there is no sign that it will return anytime soon. And it is hard to believe that any of those great Democrats would recognize their party. Neither party represents their followers. Progressive hawks dwell in a political Diaspora.

That's absurd. Progressive Iraq hawks are hardly some beleaguered minority. They compose maybe ten percent of the population at most, but count among their number the Democrats' 2004 presidential nominee, their 2004 vice presidential nominee, the last Democrat to serve as president, the minority leader of the United States Senate, the minority whip in the House, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the leading candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, the ranking members of the House Armed Services and International Relations Committees, a majority of Senate Democrats, the country's most prominent foreign affairs columnist, and all of the leading candidates for foreign policy jobs in the hypothetical Kerry administration.

Considering that their views have virtually no support in the country, that's an awful lot of power and influence inside the Democratic Party. There's been a very strange effort on the part of these people to re-write history to make themselves out to be some kind of beleaguered minority watching from the sidelines as a militantly dovish Democratic Party goes down in defeat after defeat. But Democrats were following their advice during the fiasco of 2002, and it was their people who went down to defeat in 2004. If Democratic doves have gained strength since then, it's because the war keeps going badly and the hawks' promises to lead the party into the electoral promised land keep turning out wrong.

--Matthew Yglesias

Thus endeth the lesson.

loony left
Matthew Yglesias
The American Prospect
Progressive Hawks?