Leftward Ho!

Jonah Goldberg look at how the Democratic party, post-JFK, has continued to move further and further to the left of the American people–with disastrous results.

Update: Nice piece of symmetry, as Jonah writes in his column:

The conventional wisdom is right: Democrats have a values problem. At the national level, they can’t talk about them convincingly. Even Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton staffer and now a Democratic congressman, explained to the New York Times, “people aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”

Meanwhile, David Cohen of The Brothers Judd says that same clinical approach is exactly how The New York Times approaches people in general:

The Times does not blame the [Islamofascist killers of Theo van Gogh], but the Dutch government, which did not have a plan for winning the peace. Clearly they need a Prime Minister Kerry.

Once again, the Times provides supporting evidence for my theory that the left regards people as the right regards animals, and government officials as the right regards people. Imagine a zookeeper who acquires lions for his zoo, but fails to properly segregate the new lions from the lambs. No one would blame the lions for murdering the lambs; they would simply be living out their nature. We would blame the zookeeper. The problem would not be lion immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse zoo.