PJ Buchanan sees history repeating itself for the Democrats

Patrick Buchanan, hardly a Bush booster, finds the Democrats' case against the President lacking. They tread on murky waters.

With his poll ratings at rock bottom and little to lose, Bush has just escalated the war politics. Democrats who have had it all their way since Cindy Sheehan set up Camp Casey would do well to wonder whether they have not ridden out a little too far into Indian country and are heading for the Little Big Horn where their daddies disappeared long ago.

In the late 1940s, the Party of Truman and FDR was shredded by Nixon, Bill Jenner and Joe McCarthy for having sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta, lost China, and coddled communists and Stalinist spies like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. And there was a reason the attacks stuck. They had the ancillary benefit of being true.

The media may have rewritten history to make the Edward R. Murrow Left look
like the heroes of the era, but the Democratic Party never recovered from the charge its leaders had groveled to Stalin. JFK knew it, and ran and won the presidency as an anti-communist hawk.

A generation later, Nixon and Agnew charged the Democratic Party with having marched us into Vietnam and then, when the going got tough, of having turned tail, cut and run, and gone over the hill to march with the children against the war into which they had themselves led the United States. Those charges stuck for the same reason: They were true.

Between 1961 and 1969, when America was plunged into Vietnam, Washington was Democratic, from the White House to the Capitol to the pro-war Washington Post. When Nixon arrived in 1969, Democrats started calling it "Nixon's War," but the country knew it was a Democratic war. And when the liberals turned on Nixon, America turned on them and gave him a 49-state landslide. Vietnam was the wheel on which liberalism was broken and the FDR New Deal coalition shattered forever.

Now, Democrats have maneuvered themselves onto the same risky terrain once
again.