"All tactics and no strategy"

Unlike Democrats -- "all tactics and no strategy," in Mark Steyn's words -- pussycats always have the big picture in mind. Take Susie's Daisy, for example, shocking and awing the festive, candlelit dinner table last night at a brilliant double-birthday party in Newburyport-by-the-Sea.

"I remember the outrage within the Democratic Party when Republicans rushed to the microphones to accuse the Clintons of 'corruption' over Whitewater, the F.B.I. files, the travel office, campaign finance and so on -- all issues that turned out to be rabbit holes without any findings of guilt, much less indictments," writes former Clinton special counsel Lanny Davis in a NYT op ed that the likes of Roger L. Simon himself is hailing as "a superb column on the Libby affair . . . attacking the infantile partisanship dominating American political life today." While we agree with Roger re "the infantile partisanship dominating American political life" -- today and throughout our nation's history -- we're still gagging at Lanny Davis's scare quotes attempting to gloss over the rampant Clintonian political corruption, from day one of the co-presidency, that was forever swept under the carpet with "I don't recall" and "It depends upon what  your definition of is, is." Our personal favorite was the Clinton aide whose excuse was that he had lied to his diary. Don't we all? Did that work for you, Lanny? Sorry. It didn't work for us unwashed out here. "That said" -- as they say [that particular MSM sentence filler is fingernails on the chalkboard to our ears] -- Lanny makes a lot of sense:

First, each side seems unable to resist applying a double standard, doing and saying exactly what only recently it criticized the other side for doing and saying.

'Reminds us of something we wrote here last year in the heat of the presidential election hysteria:

The issues don't change much from decade to decade, and it's fascinating to watch how arguments pro or con a particular point go back and forth between parties depending upon the current occupant of the White House. One thing that has changed between those halcyon pre-chad, pre-9/11 days and our Fahrenheit 911/527's/MoveOn, campaign-finance-reform-loophole era is the tenor of the debate. C-Span rebroadcast Cheney's and Lieberman's oh-so-civilized and -- in Donald Rumsfeld's term -- helpful debate last night. Low key, measured and rational.

Lanny continues:

President Bush should follow the ultimate rule of White House damage control: the buck stops here. He should admit that this entire mess could have been avoided had the White House, including the vice president, criticized Ambassador Joseph Wilson openly and directly, rather than whispering "on background" into the ears of certain reporters that his wife was responsible for sending him to investigate possible Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger.

'Course it would have been nice if the MSM had ever gotten around to criticizing Joseph Wilson. But no matter.  Lanny concludes:

I often wonder whether those of us in the Clinton White House who attacked the motives of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, and tried to demonize him personally would have been better off if we had focused solely on his professional misjudgments and his disproportionate expenditure of time, effort and money.

Hey.  We like that.  Lanny acknowedges that he and Clinton's other frontline practitioners of "the politics of personal destruction" preferred to demonize Kenneth Starr rather than debate the issues. 'Course that's what Democrats do. As Mark Steyn says,  "One reason the Democratic Party is such a bunch of losers is because they're all tactics and no strategy."

Comments

[goomp]

A mighty handsome portrait of Daisy. It is too bad the tactics of the Dems can't match her.