So I Thought, Hey, I Haven't Visited InstaPundit For a While. Wonder What I'll Find There?
InstaPundit guestblogger Michael Totten offers some odd political advice to the Democrats:
As far as I'm concerned, social liberalism is the best thing the Democratic Party has going for it. They should keep that and drop the pacifism and isolationism instead. They'll get a lot more votes next time around if they do. Plenty of socially liberal people voted for George W. Bush on national security grounds.
The strange thing here isn't the suggestion that the way to attract a majority of voters is to attract the vote of Michael Totten. Plenty of pundits project their preferences onto the electorate. The strange thing here isn't the idea that John Kerry is a pacifist. He obviously isn't—the man wouldn't even call for a withdrawal from Iraq, which you'd think would be point one on the pacifist agenda—but it's no surprise to hear a hawk like Totten implying otherwise.
The strange thing is the use of the word "isolationism." Just last year the warbloggers were warning that Kerry would submit America's foreign policy to a nefarious "global test." The man and his party were damned for their excessive faith in the United Nations, multilateralism, and the power of the well-crafted treaty. And now they're supposed to be isolationists? Even in the alternate universe of the GOPintern loyalist, where the Democratic Party platform is indistinguishable from the films of Michael Moore, this would make no sense: Moore's first response to 9/11 somehow found room to complain that the U.S. had withdrawn from the Durban conference on racism and had rejected the Kyoto accords.
Last year it was obvious to anyone with eyes that the Democratic establishment was run by globalist hawks. The antiwar Dems were insurgents, and their insurgency collapsed in Iowa. The doves didn't have enough pull with Kerry to turn him against the war—just enough to make his stance an incoherent muddle. If this is "pacifism and isolationism," then those words have no meaning.
