Peggy Noonan has written a column today in OpinionJournal.com about how Democrats illustrated during the SOTU speech that the only thing they'll "stand" for is blocking reform. Whenever the President and the GOP majority try to enact something, the opposition's attitude is akin to the refrain of Groucho Marx's character Professor Wagstaff in the movie "Horse Feathers":

And they have to be, because the Angry Left is watching. Noonan's analysis of how the Democrat's are self-destructing is spot on.

Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.
The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

Posted by: Gary at 09:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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