Demosophia

The Right Flyer

The point is about the notion of democratizing the Middle East, starting with Iraq, and the role played by Democrat candidates for the Presidency. You could take the position, analogous to the position of the press prior to the flight of the Wright Flyer in Dec., 1903, that it'll take a thousand years to achieve..., or you can "just do it." And once you've adopted the latter attitude it then becomes a matter of who "has the goods." And regardless of what you think of Bush's plan, or its implementation, the undeniable fact is that the opposition doesn't have one. Not even a bad one. Not even one that'll take a thousand years.

The Democrat candidates have decided to stick with riding the old mule, even though it'll mean they just keep losing ground. About the most you could say of such an election "plan" is that success rests on catastrophic failure of America's economic and foreign policy interests. Not very admirable. Morbid, in fact.

Recent polls among Democrats suggest that a candidate who simply agreed wholeheartedly with the Bush objectives, but proposed an implementation that was serious and lacked a lot of the ad hoc blundering, would be not only capable of winning the nomination, but of winning in Nov., 2004. And the issue is, why is there no such candidate? You can look at recent speeches by Dean to see that he's beginning to perceive a looming gap... if he were only credible in the critical role, and halfway understood it. The notion that he'd buy the PNAC program, but refine and perfect it, is just not likely to convince anyone, and his current funding would dry up like a mirage in the desert if he went very quickly that direction. (Quickly and unambiguously enough to actually be credible, that is.) So about the most he'd ever be able to come up with is some sort of half-assed version of the Bush program... and that's just not going to sell. It wouldn't sell even if the Bush program were perceived as "three-quarter-assed." We're through with half-assed measures, as of September, 2001.

We're going all out for powered flight now, which means we'll either succeed big or fail big. It's achetypal Americanism. And the basic choice is between a practical and balanced analytical/experimental approach like that of the Wright Brothers, or an ill-considered and power-biased one like that of Samuel P. Langley. If the Democrats don't see an opening here, it's because they're still on the wrong side of history.