Yes. Partisanship is good. Read, Democrats, and obey.
A telling and pitiful moment along these lines arrived on Thursday, June 27, a week before the Harken news. That's when a piece of campaign literature was published by the National Conservative Campaign Fund, which donates to and makes expenditures on behalf of GOP candidates nationwide. It delivered the staggering claim that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle presented a "far greater danger" to the republic than American Taliban member John Walker Lindh. One might have thought that such an outré attack on their leader would embolden Democrats to stand as one and answer back. Well, they did stand as one -- literally: Poor Harry Reid of Nevada was the only Democratic senator to respond. Why weren't 15 of them up there, with a list of every dollar the fund had donated to GOP candidates in the last two election cycles, demanding that those same candidates -- a lineup that includes, speaking of cutthroat partisan politics, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- return their donations and that the White House denounce the flier and distance itself from the group?
You can bet that if a liberal fundraising organization had essentially called Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott a traitor, his colleagues would have damn well known what to do with it. Exploiting such opportunities, after all, is the sort of thing Republicans have been doing to Democrats for years now, from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney and Bush consigliere Karl Rove. They've done it extremely well. Democrats have done it miserably. In fact they haven't done it at all. As a result, domestic politics for much of the last 20 years has looked like a boxing match in which, under a new set of rules that permits kicking and throwing punches below the belt, one pugilist voluntarily tells the ref he'll just play by the old rules, thanks. Republicans, for all their caterwauling about how they're outnumbered in Washington, how nasty liberals are and how beastly the media is, recognize that spewing out a lot of hooey about those dominant Democrats keeps the blood percolating among the true believers, so they keep doing it. But privately, how they must chortle about this state of affairs! They've been fighting a one-armed man.
