Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Democrats are being monumentally stupid in taking the bait of Rumsfeld's speech. It would have been much better to ignore it on grounds that Rumsfeld said things everyone agrees with—we're dealing with a totalitarian threat that can't be appeased and whose evil there should be absolutely no confusion about. Democrats would be shrewd not to appear to contest any of that, and keep the argument about how well the war in Iraq is going. But they can't help themselves—if someone says the word "appease," Democrats reflexively leap to protest too much. Part of what's at play here is the mis-applied lesson of the Swift Boat episode—respond to everything. But sometimes it makes no sense to respond. Administration officials are delighted, just delighted with the Democratic response and the debate is going so well that the GOP Senate leadership, after waiting 24 hours to see how it would play, is apparently going to weigh in sometime soon here.