Pegging the Democrat’s Behavior

Some Senate Democrats, – a group my friend Bill Berdine calls “Boxer, Byrd and the Brotherhood” – appalled many of us conservatives with their pitiful display of petulance, small-mindedness, and mean-spiritedness during the confirmation process for Dr. Condoleeza Rice as Secretary of State.

As he so often does, Wesley Pruden perfectly describes this shameless display in today’s column in The Washington Times on Hillary Clinton as the hope and promise of the Democratic Party.

The old bulls (and a superannuated heifer or two) occupied themselves this week by ganging up on the uppity colored girl from Alabama who doesn't understand that her proper place is one of eternal supplication for the largesse of liberals. They called her a liar, an ingrate and a deceiver, making pluperfect fools of themselves, while Hillary Clinton was showing everyone how she intends to seize Republican bread and conservative butter, stealing the Republican mantra of family, faith and freedom, even finally putting an end to the endless abortion war by winning it.

Hillary, in fact, is emerging as the bright light in a party of dim bulbs, a fading galaxy of has-beens reeking of halitosis and stale underwear. But for the reinvention of Mrs. Clinton, it was a week of Democratic public-relations hell. Thirteen of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate, including some of the party's most brittle icons, spent their days putting a face on the party that could take decades to erase: a gnarled old Ku Klux Klansman stumbling through a litany of lamentation for a day dead and gone, a puffy cut-and-run lady killer (so to speak) drowning (you might say) in nostalgia for what might have been, and the long-in-the-tooth prom queen, green eyes flashing with envy and rage, throwing tomatoes and eggs at Condi Rice and managing only to leave themselves exposed as pathetic jokes smeared with rotten yolks.

Some Democrats tried to look away in embarrassment bordering on mortification. "If you feel Condoleezza Rice is not qualified to be secretary of state," Joe Lieberman told them in a voice burdened with rue and remorse, "then of course you must vote against her. But if you are -- and I hate to use the word 'just' -- but just upset about some of the things this administration has done in Iraq, but if you feel otherwise that what we are doing now is all we can do to make the situation better, then I appeal to you to vote for Dr. Rice." Most Democrats, including their leader, did just that, leaving the 13 soreheads seething in the shade of their own indifference to a very special moment in the nation's history.