the Petty Party

Have Democrats lost their minds since the election of 2004?

Honestly, it's a serious question. The behavior of the Democrat leadership is getting increasingly bizarre and petty.

Granted that because of stunning strings of victories in the Presidency and Congress in the last several years the Democrat Party has been reduced to being the Petty Party, reduced to nothing more than sniping at the party in power. They've long run out of any new ideas, being still enmeshed as the New Deal broker of entitlements, and are constantly whining with some new petty variant of "you can't do that" when Republicans take on big things and succeed. Seriously, have Barbara Boxer or Harry Reid said anything other than that of late?

President Bush, on the other hand, staked his administration on big ideas and big actions and was vindicated with re-election. Under his leadership, his administration and his Republican allies have run up a string of successes both foreign and domestic. Despite Democrat carping about the impossibility of his actions in the War on Terror, Bush keeps racking up wins with elections in Afghanistan and Iraq that the Petty Party claimed were impossible.

I know that it's unnerving for Democrats to be wrong so many times in a row. And it must be infuriating for them to see the Bush Administration stand up for our national defense in an uncompromising way, and to ignore their sniping at his heels.

But really, have they lost their ever loving minds lately, in response?

I refer to 3 recent events, for discussion:

1. The election of the most strident, most left-wing, most anti-war, most bomb-throwing candidate - Mr. Howard Dean - as the Chairman of the Democrat Party

2. Chairman Dean's recent speech in which he implied that conservatives were evil. Not merely wrong, mind you, but evil.

"This is a struggle of good and evil," he told the gathered activists, who paid $100 apiece to hear the new Democratic chairman. "And we're the good."

Folks, we have a two party system in this country. One may be wrong at any point in time, as I believe the left in general and the Democrats in specific are most of the time, but neither party is evil. When you start labeling domestic political opponents as "evil", you've lost the argument.

3. Sen. Robert Byrd (D, W. VA) gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week concerning a proposed change in arcane filibustering rules in which he compared the actions of the Republicans to change the rules to the actions of Adolph Hitler in the Third Reich.

This is eggregious on so many levels and Sen Byrd, former Klansman, should be the object of scorn by his fellow Democrats for using the platform of the U.S. Senate to level such an outlandish charge. He will not be, of course, because such actions are no longer beneath the dignity of the Petty Party.