Hath Hell Frozen Over?

It must be as cold a day in hell today as it is in central Pennsylvania, because Viewpoint finds itself agreeing with Michael Moore who writes that:

[It's awful] to watch the pathetic sight of the DLC (the conservative, pro-corporate group of Democrats) apologizing for being Democrats and promising to "purge" the party of the likes of, well, all of US! Their comments are so hilarious and really not even worth recognizing but the media is paying so much attention to them, I thought it might be worth doing a little reality check. The most people the DLC is able to get out to an event of theirs is about 200 at their annual dinner (where you have to pay thousands of dollars to get in).

Contrast this with the following:

*Total members of Move On: More than 2,000,000

*Total Attendance at Vote for Change Concerts: An estimated 280,000

*Total Union Members in U.S.: Around 16,000,000

*Total Number of People Who Have Seen "Fahrenheit 9/11": Over 50 million

*Total number of you reading this: Perhaps 10 million or more

The days of trying to move the Democratic Party to the right are over. We lost a very close election (a one-state difference) by running the #1 liberal in the Senate. Not bad. The country is shifting in our direction, not to the right. But the country was attacked and people were scared. They were manipulated with fear. And America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That's the facts. Oh, and our candidate could have run a better campaign (but we'll have that discussion another day).

We agree with much of what Moore says in this last paragraph, but we would decline to say that our fear of terrorism was somehow "manipulated". We would also add that not only was the campaign flawed, so was the candidate. He had a suspect military record about which he obviously lied, he spent twenty years in the senate without a major accomplishment to his credit, and he projected the image of a vacillator unable to take a stand. He appeared to be a man with no deep convictions.

Even so, he almost won, and we think Moore is right that there is a leftward flow in the country. The whole ideological spectrum is shifting leftward, so that people who would have been considered centrists a generation ago are today labeled conservatives. George Bush is a good example. President Bush holds views on many issues not much different than FDR, but the left has drifted so far toward the nether regions of the solar system that Bush appears conservative by comparison. Confirmation of this drift can be found in the names gracing the current Republican Hall of Heroes: John McCain, Rudy Guiliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not a particularly conservative bunch.

What this shift augurs for the future of the U.S. is not hard to discern. All we need do is look at Europe.