As you may know, left-wing activists held a conference in D.C. this week called Take Back America. They invited Howard Dean and John Kerry to speak. Neither mentioned Iraq, which has the “progressives” up in arms. Reports David Corn:

Former (and current?) presidential aspirant John Edwards addressed a crowd of hundreds at lunch. He talked earnestly (as he does) about the need to help all those sons and daughters of mill workers (and other hardworking Americans) who didn’t get the breaks he received as a son of a mill worker. And when it came to foreign policy, he passionately discussed promoting moral values and development abroad.

He denigrated a foreign policy that delivers the rhetoric of freedom and not the reality of economic progress and true liberty. Is a six-year-old girl in Sudan really free, he asked, if she goes to bed each day hungry? But throughout his 25-minute-long speech, Edwards did not make a single reference to Iraq. How, you might ask, can anyone speechify about US foreign policy without mentioning Iraq? Well, it’s not too difficult. When Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean spoke to the group in the morning, he too said not a word about the war in Iraq.

Dean was too preoccupied with his usual paranoia-laced spewing against Republicans. It was left to Arianna , Our Lady of Perpetual Pandering, to do the heavy huffing and puffing that insatiable, anti-war grievance-mongers crave. So now liberal bloggers are irked. See TalkLeft, The Nation, and MyDD.

Perhaps with poll results like this and the marginalization of moonbattery like this, Dem leaders are starting to get the message that they’ll never be able to “Take Back America” if they persist in trashing it.