Forget “new tone” — conservatives are in a fighting mood
Jed Babbin has been eating red meat:
The liberals will suffer the most when — as is almost certain — Chief Justice Rehnquist also resigns and the President nominates a second judicial conservative. Howard Dean’s head may implode, others will spontaneously combust, and the rest will vanish into their psychiatrists’ offices. (I once recommended the purchase of Roche Pharmaceuticals and GlaxoSmithKline stock because they make Wellbutrin and Prozac. If you don’t buy them now, you really should die poor.) The libs, not Dubya, will suffer Confirmation Paralysis. It is thus precisely the right time to pull out all the stops, and accomplish some critical objectives.
For each liberal attack there must be a counterattack. Today we may learn from the Time magazine papers divulged to a grand jury that the source of the leak of Joe Wilson’s wife’s identity as a CIA agent was White House chief of staff Karl Rove. If it was Rove who leaked the story, the President and the Attorney General should defend Rove to the death for one simple reason: there was no crime committed. If it wasn’t, the Attorney General should order an end to this out of control investigation. And this would be a good time to go ahead — as publicly as possible — with the criminal investigation of Senators Rockefeller, Wyden and Durbin for their leak of the highly classified satellite program last December….
We don’t like the “new tone” business either. However, it seems clear that it is part of a conscious electoral strategy. If that is true, the private polling data must indicate that letting the frothers of the Left froth while appearing measured and moderate in tone is the superior path for winning elections. On that score, the reults seem clear and positive. So maybe we just have to put up with a poker strategy that, time and again, involves letting the opposition overplay their hand.
That may be effective, but it is incredibly frustrating, particularly in the age of the omnipresent media.