Post-Bush Stress Disorder ("Conservatives are noisy but irrelevant")

In "The Godfather," Sonny talks about going "to the mattresses," meaning war with rival Mafia families. Now President Obama and the Democrats are holing up together on their Posturepedics as they work out battle plans on health care, banking reform, and Afghanistan. The question is whether they'll be daring soldiers of the future or content to fight the last war.

That war, when Republicans controlled at least one branch of government, created a mindset where many moderate Democrats now constantly fear giving the other side ammunition. There's some logic in this. Overreaching is always a danger in politics, and House Democrats in particular are to the left of the country as a whole. Appeasing powerful health-care interests, as the White House did early on, was a smart move. By delaying a climactic battle, Obama built momentum for a bill. The same sequencing was true for banks and the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The bleeding had to stop before their treatment could be properly managed. (Click here to follow Jonathan Alter.)

But Democrats are now at risk of post-Bush stress disorder (PBSD), a trauma that can cripple their efforts to adjust to everyday life in a new era. Their longtime enemy—potent Republicans—is gone, a mere memory of pain. But Republican ways of thinking have infected the minds of too many Democrats. More than a few have fallen into the GOP habit of selling out to corporate interests (the $1.5 million that health-related lobbies contributed to Max Baucus in 2007–08 goes a long way in Montana), pandering to banks, and reflexively assuming that just because the Pentagon recommends escalation in Afghanistan, it must be necessary. These habits will have to be broken if

Alter is the 'Rat Media Tool who wrote a column in August 1995 telling Republicans (after the press had been savaging them mercilessly about everything for eight solid months, literally going to war on conservatives and GOP'ers) that they were on the verge of becoming silly and irrelevant. That nobody would ever take them seriously again because of their HUGE ELECTORAL VICTORY with the Contract with America and Newt Gingrich as House Speaker.

Alter told them all that.

Then he said, however ..... there is a way out for Republicans. They can nominate someone with real experience, a solid record as a legislator and Washington Insider, someone that Everybody Takes Seriously. They could nominate for 1996 a rock-solid candidate ..... in BOB DOLE. Dole, you see, had what conservatives never do .... Dole had ..... gravitas!

Well, guess what?

Clinton had, with his Chinese reptile money, performed his '96 campaign issue research between April and July '95, working exclusively in what are called "C" markets like Jacksonville, Mississippi, and Paducah, Kentucky. He and Dick "Dicky Toe-Sucker" Morris had focus-grouped, polled, and test-run various ads and pitches, trying out the technique e.g. of "bracketing" Bob Dole with Newt Gingrich, to see if they could hurt Dole that way (answer: yes), Gingrich having been mauled for months on end with every slimy story the 'Rat Underground could dig up and put on Page One of TIME, Newsweek, and all the major papers, as well as 'Rat assets like ABC News.

So what are the odds that, by the time Jonathan Alter wrote his article booming up Bob Dole, Alter did not know that Clinton and Morris had established that Bob Dole was Clinton's best matchup?

Alter is almost a perfect negative weather vane for conservatives. Practically everything he writes is a partisan lie.

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