A New Old Shibboleth

shib·bo·leth: 3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.

When even the assistant editor of The New Republic isn't buying the "new" model for foreign policy that many in the Democratic party are leaning toward, you know that something is out of whack. James Kirchick points out that the "new" model is just an old model - without even a fresh coat of paint. His target: none other than Ned Lamont.

While faulting Lieberman for historical ignorance in his recent claim that the Democratic Party has abandoned its “muscular tradition” of “Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and the Clinton-Gore administration,” the commentary by Lamont in last Tuesday’s Politico underscores his own lack of political knowledge.

Praising the first Bush administration and “our bipartisan foreign policy tradition,” Lamont neglects to mention that the vast majority of Democrats in Congress opposed the first Gulf War; Gore and Lieberman were two of just 10 Democratic senators to vote in favor of authorizing the use of American force.

Lieberman’s prescience then would be derided as warmongering now.

As if further evidence were needed that the party is rejecting its past, Lamont’s own column embraces the worst elements of coldhearted GOP “realism,” the sort of foreign policy that Clinton and Gore derided when they ran for the White House and the antithesis of everything that progressive internationalists should stand for.

Lamont is hardly alone. So-called progressives look with great reverence to Scowcroft and Baker, erstwhile bugbears of Democratic Party talking points.

But tyrants the world over have no better friends in the American power elite than these two men.

So why are liberals warming up to them?

Amid his effusive praise for GOP realists, Lamont betrays an astounding degree of obliviousness to the fact that he epitomizes the death of the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy tradition that Lieberman bemoaned earlier this month.

Everything old is new again. One of the driving reasons for "realism" was that the nation was in the midst of a long Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a lot of unpalatable decisions acceptable to the "realists." We need to keep that in perspective.

It's funny how today's theme appears to be recycling. From sewage to LBJ to stepping right back boldly into the foreign policy past. Or maybe th theme actually is sewage. Hard to say.

Everything old is new again. One of the driving reasons for "realism" was that the nation was in the midst of a long Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a lot of unpalatable decisions acceptable to the "realists." We need to keep that in perspective.

It's funny how today's theme appears to be recycling. From sewage to LBJ to stepping right back boldly into the foreign policy past. Or maybe th theme actually is sewage. Hard to say.

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  By Michael Pugliese, Tuesday, 27 November , 2007 @ 5:20 pm

  Remember that in Ned’s family tree was the infamous fellow traveller of Stalinism, Corliss Lamont. In his last decade, just as was the case during the Moscow Purge Trials of ‘36-’38, when he signed a statement opposing Joan Baez, “Open Letter to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, he directed much of his efforts to opposing the anti-Stalinists on the socialist left and the cold war liberals.

Other Links to this Post

1. RealClearPolitics - Blog Coverage — Tuesday, 27 November , 2007 @ 12:02 pm

2. Blue Crab Boulevard » The Price Of Greatness — Tuesday, 27 November , 2007 @ 7:55 pm