Victor Davis Hanson writes about the problems of the Democrats, starting with the fact that Republicans “have been systematically trespassing onto Democratic territory.”
An African-American secretary of state was succeeded by an African-American woman, previously our first female national security adviser. The first Hispanic attorney general is now also one of the candidates being considered for the Supreme Court vacancy. The Republican Party’s national chairman is Jewish.
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Bush administration foreign policy has put the Democrats in another exasperating dilemma. Usually Republicans are caricatured as selfish isolationists or dour realists, not the muscular idealists of the Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy stripe that many are today. . . .
[T]he leading members of the [Democratic] party — who have become the new reactionaries in American political life — choose to fixate on John Bolton and try to ankle-bite a wartime president working to bring democracy to the Middle East.
On his website, Hanson responds to a reader arguing that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was correct that the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo was “exactly what one might have expected in Auschwitz or a Siberian gulag.”
Here is what you would apparently imagine instead [at Auschwitz, to make the comparison apt]:
Red Cross visits to see the Jewish inmates; not a single death at the camp (rather than 10,000 a day); Torahs supplied to every inmate, with special Kosher food given; all the while Nazi camp guards would write members of the Reichstag to complain about the heat or cold in the inmates’ cells.
That you would not see through this silly comparison [by Sen. Durbin] is not merely perplexing but amoral, inasmuch as the Holocaust is thus reduced to loud music, occasional shackles, and periodic oppressive heat, and not a single death. Nazi doctors used the inmates as human subjects, rather than gave them x-rays, heart monitors, and sophisticated medical care.
Durbin is the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. What has happened to the Democratic Party?