I noticed something interesting when looking at Ed Kilgore’s trenchant remarks on Joe Lieberman’s recent SAIS speech:

It provides an exceptionally simplistic and mechanical history of partisanship and foreign policy. Democrats were “good” from World War II until Vietnam, and Republicans tended to be “bad.” Democrats were “bad” from Vietnam to the First Gulf War, and Republicans were “good.” During the Clinton administration, and particularly with respect to the Kosovo intervention, Democrats were “good” and most Republicans (excepting Dole and McCain) were “bad,” and that characterization remained true during the 2000 elections (Lieberman’s running-mate Al Gore “good,” the humility-in-foreign-policy Bush “bad”). Both parties were “good” from 9/11 through the Iraq War authorization, but once the war began, Republicans were “good” and Democrats turned “bad” (presumably including Al Gore, who was prematurely “bad” in opposing the war).

One illustration of how dimwitted this worldview is, is that in Liebermanland the “good” political party is pretty much always and everywhere the party that was in power at the time. That’s because in the Joe Lieberman Handbook to Strategy, the test of your foreign policy acumen is just supporting wars. And, of course, presidents tend to only launch wars that they support. Thus at any given time, the incumbent will either be not starting a war (neutral) or else supporting his own policies (good) whereas the loudest opponents of his policies (bad) will be in the other party. The idea that there might be good and bad ways of using force, good or bad circumstances in which to use them, or heaven forbid other kinds of good policymaking (avoiding wars!) is just off the table.

Rosa Brooks says abortion is passé, the right’s new thing is torture: “Today, though, the GOP’s interest in abortion appears greatly diminished. When President Bush nominated Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general, no one seemed clear about Mukasey’s views on abortion — and no one in the GOP seemed to care very much either.” You can also look up the Ascent of Rudy in this regard.

I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be voting for Joe Biden for President, but I think Transplanted Texan at MYDD will be and his post yesterday drew my attention to this fairly prescient Joe Biden speech from September 10, 2001 on foreign policy in which it was clear that the combination of hubris and fanaticism that have made the Bush administration so dangerous on so many fronts was already evident in some ways.

Also interesting here is the context. Basically, Biden was laying the groundwork for an upcoming series of congressional hearings that were aimed at debunking the administration’s case for a national missile defense system. The basic argument Democrats were making was that rogue state ballistic missiles were a very hypothetical threat and a missile defense system was a very expensive hypothetical defense against it. The top priority, in Democrats’ view, was to maintain good relations with Russia and China to maximize diplomatic leverage against North Korea (and to a lesser extent, the less acute problems of Iran and Iraq) and to focus on counterterrorism threats.

Condi Rice, meanwhile, was set to give a speech on 9/11 that was all about the need to meet the threats of “tomorrow” and accusing her blinkered, terrorism-and-nonproliferation-centric adversaries of living in the past. Naturally, Rice wasn’t planning on mentioning terrorism at all and when subsequent events revealed the wrongheadedness of the basic worldview, instead of revising the worldview they responded to the terrorist attacks in crazy ways (invading Iraq, e.g.) that met their preconceptions about what was important rather than with policies that addressed the issue at hand in effective ways.