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Let’s Talk About Ohio

Wednesday Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic campaign committee, said: “This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush and being his love child means.” Pretty clever. But the mindset that outputs humor like that is likely to produce a politics that rubs swing voters the wrong way in, say, Ohio. ~Daniel Henninger Um, […]

Wednesday Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the House Democratic campaign committee, said: “This shows what blind loyalty to George Bush and being his love child means.” Pretty clever. But the mindset that outputs humor like that is likely to produce a politics that rubs swing voters the wrong way in, say, Ohio. ~Daniel Henninger

Um, would that be the same Ohio where party loyalist and war supporter Mike “We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Constitution” DeWine trails Sherrod Brown by eight points in a state that Mr. Bush won two years ago?  Granted that Ohio GOP woes have a lot to do with local problems and the self-inflicted wounds of the most corrupt state party in the nation (okay, you got me, the Illinois GOP is the most corrupt state party), these numbers say a lot about voter dissatisfaction and resentment against the current majority. 

You get the sense in all of the shrill attacks on Lamont for his alleged McGovernism that these people know that the public is fed up to here with the deceit and abuses of GOP rule, so they are hoping to bludgeon the public back in their direction by imputing some sort of strategic blindness to people who think that depriving al Qaeda of its chief recruiting tool and greatest symbol–a Western occupation at the heart of the Islamic world–might be a wise move.  But the warnings against McGovernite electoral weakness don’t ring true here–there is real fear that when offered a choice to leave Iraq or to stay the public will choose the former, and if the people choose that option the deceitful Republican media will have a difficult time spinning it as a lack in patriotism or insufficient concern about national security. 

What the British plane plot shows, incidentally, is that branches of al Qaeda (which is who I’m assuming was behind this for the moment) continue to go about their business much as they had before Iraq and that invading Iraq has not only made no positive contributions to fighting al Qaeda it has manifestly weakened us.  To listen to the rhetoric of people like Henninger I would almost be inclined to draw the conclusion that people who continue to support the war don’t care about our national security and have no idea what would be best for the nation–but that would be the sort of scurrilous, repulsive accusation that only a Wall Street Journal hack would make.

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