The Drum Beat

Posted on February 12, 2004 in Blogging Campaign 2004 Liberals & Progressives War

The web is receiving the credit for keeping freedom of information alive at a time when real news was hard to come by. Eric Margolis wrote in his Toronto Sun column that “During the Iraq war, the Internet became a sort of ‘Radio Free America’ that gave the lie to all the White House’s war propaganda promoted by the mainstream media.”

We do deserve some of the patting on the back for the apparent (though perhaps short-lived) dethroning of George W. Bush; the most conservative of the liberals continue to receive most of the press. Calpundit was applauded in an article reprinted from Tomdispatch for his service in revealing the truth about the pResident’s National Guard service; Tom does not go back to Kevin Drum’s March 2003 archive where he could have mined comments such as this one:

So if I thought that opposing the war had a chance of hurting Bush’s re-election, it would probably be all the nudge I’d need to actually switch sides and oppose it. I’ve never thought that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat, so postponing war for a while would have little downside, while getting rid of Bush would have a big upside.

What this means is that while people like me were promoting emergency petitions to the UN asking it to intervene against the war and sniping at phantom propaganda boats that reportedly carried away all of Hussein’s WMDs for the duration, Kevin was going along with the WMDs story for purely partisan motives.

Now that the American public knows what was pretty damned obvious last year to me and several other bloggers, Kevin’s soft-pedaling his hawk stance so that he can promote the cause of John Kerry, another Vichy Democrat. It’s sinking in the consciousness of the American center, as Tom Engelman observes, that Bush is looking more and more like the-four-horsemen-of-the-Apocalypse-all-riding-on-one-spotted-pony; it’s not sinking into most Democrats that the likes of Kerry and Drum have no plan for getting us out of Iraq. On the contrary, it seems that they are just fine with keeping us there, holding our boys out as AK-47 targets, continuing to present America as the bully on the block who won’t listen to the rest of the world.

When it comes to people like me, Kevin’s most concerned that we’ll make his kind of Vichy Democrat look bad when the polls open up in November. I met him in person at one of the blogging meet-ups for Orange County (actual photographic proof) at which time we discussed National Health Care as a possible Democratic platform. Kevin stated that he liked the idea of National Health Care but didn’t want to press it as a campaign issue because after the hit pieces done on the Clinton plan, it would be too embarassing to defend.

If you read Kevin’s blog, you will often find this kind of logic permeating his articles about wild-eyed Leftists like — um — me. We’re an embarassment, we represent a losing strategy because of our timing. Drum and Kerry better start appreciating that it was people like me who first shone the light into the dark interiors of Bush’s mind, by questioning the Weapons of Mass Destruction that were supposed to be stationed on every corner of the capital city of Bagdhad. Personally, when I look over Drum’s commentary on the war and Kerry’s let-Bush-have-his-way-votes, I find ample room for embarassment in both matters. And yet we go along with the idea that these two Radio-Don’t-Make-Waves-America represent the best intellectual and political alternative to the Bush machine?

Think again. Especially if you live in Wisconsin.