A moment of clarity

I just had a heck of a thought.

What if... stay with me, here... what if there's an overarching sense to all the silliness from the Democratic Party? Let's review:

• Leaders of the party repeatedly declare the war in Iraq a "quagmire" and unwinnable in the face of clear evidence - such as Osama bin Laden's call for a truce and the coalition government that's forming in Iraq - that it's eminently winnable if we keep our concentration;
  
• ordinary Democrat folks and some elected Democrats stay on message with "Bush Lied!" in the face of non-partisan evidence that he just, well, didn't;
  
• the Left blogosphere's rhetoric, ranging from tediously repetitive claims that Bush is simultaneously dumb as a rock and sly enough to fool the entire body of the American public all the way up to calls for impeachment and even assassination, and Party leaders fail to denounce that rhetoric, instead even appearing as commenters and diarists on the blogs of some of the big offenders;
  
• Kerry continues to make solemn pronouncements and take quixotic actions regularly, in spite of even Left-side commentators' head-scratching about his unbelievable "tone-deafness";
  
• Gore continues to seek relevance in all the wrong places;
  
• Cindy Sheehan may be running for the Senate against Dianne Feinstein;
  
• Kennedy continues to see (or at least acknowledge) no irony in his moralistic scoldings of Alito;
  
• public and private spokespeople for the party have staked out the side of the NSA program "controversy" that aligns them with the interests of terrorists, so that when they protest that they're for the program but against the method, they're vulnerable to widespread interpretations that they've again put a perceived privacy right of criminals ahead of a significantly more defensible right of law-abiding citizens to expect their government to take all prudent actions to protect them from physical danger;
  
• and at every turn we're warned not to question their patriotism.
  

Maybe they have a double-secret agenda: to make the anti-war, anti-Bush case so completely batty and unacceptable to everyone with a shred of perspective or proportion that they ensure that the American will is bound to remain strong enough to finish the job in the Middle East. Maybe 9/11 was as crystalline a moment for them as it was for the rest of us, and they've just chosen a strangely Machiavellian course to address its imperatives. So we shouldn't question their patriotism after all - just play along, keep on acting puzzled and triumphalist and only give them the wink when we're sure no Islamist is looking.

Or maybe it's just the nachos. Baked chips, fat-free refried black beans, but of course real pepper jack cheese, a dollop of sour cream, and the Safeway Chipotle Salsa... mmmmmmm....