Republicans (and Republican fellow travelers, such as Lieberman has become) immediately sought to salve their fears about the rising tide of progressive democratic politics symbolized by the Lamont victory in Connecticut by resorting to Orwellian doublespeak that sought to twist new signs of democratic strength into signs of weakness or extremism. What a surprise!

Instead of recognizing what the Lamont victory clearly represents--the growing strength of a progressive democratic resurgence in this country that has clear ideas about how to build a strong America by taking our government back from the corporate sycophants in Congress who have been systematically and continually weakening our country, the Republicans would like to deflect attention from their own terrible weakness and failures of policy through Orwellian language games that deny the new center of political strength: progressive democracy.  

As we've been hearing on the news, our own electricity grids in the US are now strained to their limits.  Put that together with the underinvestment in public infrastructure in this country, and the lack of any serious strategy to address global warming, and it doesn't take a crystal ball or a visionary to see why we may soon be seeing "Baghdad summers" right here in the US... (See jay lassiter's post from earlier today on mydd, "Hotter than Baghdad in New Jersey.")

And, of course, all of us who cannot afford air conditioning now are already feeling the heat of Baghdad in the U.S. Certainly for anyone who earns less than $30,000 a year, and for anyone in the "lower" middle-classes... the combination of high gas prices, high energy bills, high heat indexes, and the coming increase in food prices in response to all of this is making "poverty" feel like an extremely relative term!

According to the overwhelming majority (84 percent) of top foreign policy experts surveyed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, we are losing the war on terrorism.

So now the only question for the Democratic Party is:  When will it stop allowing Republican rhetoric about "cutting and running" to continue to cow Democrats into a defensive strategy?  When will the Democrats turn this deceptive rhetoric around and put the emphasis where it should be:  On the fact that the Republican Strategy is one of keeping American Soldiers in Iraq to STAY AND BLEED while the Bush administration continues to act without any clear policy whatsoever for decreasing the violence in the Middle-East?