More Discretion Than Valor

So the Dems have a "new direction." As this piece in the Boston Globe puts it, their ideas for governance are to "hike the minimum wage, slash interest rates on student loans, and install a new package of restrictions on lobbying activities that is designed to increase accountability in government."

Anyone notice what's missing? Hello, remember the war on terror? Little is forthcoming, of course, because the Democrats can't agree on what to do -- or if it's even worth fighting.

But the omission is a telling one, indicating that the Dems don't take the war seriously, except as a political issue. And the plan is likely to do little to bring disaffected former lefties like Seth Swirsky back into the fold, because it fails to address the very good questions Swirsky asks:

What Democrat could support Al Gore's '04 choice for President, Howard Dean, when Dean didn't dismiss the suggestion that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks? Or when the second most powerful Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, thought our behavior at the detention center in Guantanamo was equivalent to Bergen Belsen and the Soviet gulags? Or when Senator Kennedy equated the unfortunate but small incident at Abu Ghraib with Saddam's 40-year record of mass murder, rape rooms, and mass graves saying, "Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under new management, U.S. management"?

The Dems' "new direction" is just the same old direction, re-outfitted to suit the current occasion. For the left, apparently, discretion isn't just the better part of valor -- it's all they have to muster in the way of valor.

Update: As reader Dan has reminded me in a timely email, the Democrats also "forgot" to mention the "little" issue of illegal immigration! Whereas omitting the war is to avoid intra-party fighting, omitting the illegal immigration issue is largely a concession that the Dems open-border approach is anathema to the vast majority of the American people.