Softspoken, Kind, Tolerant, Bi-partisan

Referring to the expected veto of Democrat legislation setting a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq to begin October 1 and be completed six months later, Harry Reid yesterday said:

"If the president disagrees, let him come to us with an alternative. Instead of sending us back to square one with a veto, some tough talk and nothing more, let him come to the table in the spirit of bipartisanship that Americans demand and deserve."

I guess that "spirit" was not what Reid was thinking about when he also said:

"No more will Congress turn a blind eye to the Bush administration's incompetence and dishonesty.

It is a sad commentary on our society and culture when the Majority leader in the Senate resorts to such vile disrespect simply for the purpose of pandering to the base of his party. Evidently he has done the political calculus and determined that there is no political price to be paid for calling the President of the United States an incompetent liar living in a state of denial. He may wish to recalculate when he sees that Senator Chuck Hagel, R, Nebraska is 9 points behind in his Senate race. Evidently, Nebraskans do not approve of the anti-war Republican and only 37% think he would make a good President. But back to the Senate Majority Leader - Perhaps the "distinguished" Senator from Nevada feels that he is speaking in measured, moderate, bipartisan terms. After all, by the standards of his Democrat constituents they probably are moderate and measured. Call me old fashioned, but when the Senate leader also refers to the Vice-President as the president's "chief attack dog," I shudder for the future of our society. But why shouldn't we expect to hear this kind of language from the Democrat leadership? In March, Charles Krauthammer addressed this new low in society when he wrote about a 2,000 word New Republic article making the case that Vice-President Dick Cheney was demented as result of his heart condition.

According to Krauthammer, the NR article offered the following evidence of the Vice-President's dementia:

(a) Using a four-letter word in an exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy. Good God, by that standard, I should have been committed long ago and the entire borough of Brooklyn quarantined.
(b)"Shoot a man in the face and not bother to call your boss 'til the next day?" Another way of putting that is this: After a hunting accident, Cheney tried to get things in order before going public. Not the best decision, as I wrote at the time, but perfectly understandable. And if that is deranged, what do you say about a young Teddy Kennedy being far less forthcoming about something far more serious -- how he came to leave a dead woman at the bottom of a pond? I am passing no judgment. I am simply pointing out how surpassingly stupid it is to attribute such behavior to mental illness.
(c) Longtime associate Brent Scowcroft quoted as saying, "Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." Well. After 9/11, Cheney adopted a view about fighting jihadism, America's new existential enemy, that differed radically from the "realist" foreign policy approach that he had shared a decade earlier with Scowcroft. That's a psychiatric symptom? By that standard, Saul of Tarsus, Arthur Vandenberg, Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan -- to pick at random from a thousand such cases of men undergoing profound change of worldview -- are psychiatric cases. Indeed, by that standard, Andrew Sullivan is stark raving mad. (OK, perhaps not the best of counterexamples.)

At one time, the New Republic was the left's version of National Review. Now, it is simply a far-left rag. Maybe it still represents the mainstream thinking of liberal America. If so, God help us because we are seeing the beginning of a not so kind, not so tolerant, not so bipartisan America. Liberals will present their counter arguments and examples but those don't change the fact that our society has coarsened a little more with each successive, post WWII generation. Harry Reid is just "keeping it real" for his posse.