Dafydd at Big Lizards has an excellent diagnosis of the Dems’ failed approach to the War on Terror:

The DemoWOT Understanding — it sounds like a Robert Ludlum title; and that’s appropriate, because it strikes me as quite childish, a way of minimizing and trivializing the very real war we find ourselves in, of turning it into the Phil Donohue or Steven Spielberg version: the Democrats make the actual GWOT simplistic, narrow, legalistic, and most important, a fight that has a “magic bullet” that will make it all go away very soon, allowing everyone to slide back to September 10th, when the issue of greatest moment was whether Bush was going to roll back the environmental “gains” of the Clinton administration… and the only American ground troops abroad wore either NATO patches or blue UN helmets.

Every attempt to expand the GWOT to include countries other than Afghanistan, no matter how logical or how well connected they are to terrorism (not only Iraq but Iran, Indonesia, Syria, North Korea, and now Venezuela, which has begun to ally itself with the lunatics in Teheran, embracing Holocaust denial and nuclear threats against America), provokes a visceral reaction among the American Left to the effect that it’s all just a further distraction from the real job — which is to scrub those Afghan mountains and arrest bin Laden.

This, I believe, is the GWOT manifestation of the core Democratic void: without universal animating principles, they are left with an ideology that is just a hastily stitched patchwork quilt, where no thought is given to an overall pattern, or even whether adjoining patches match or clash violently. But this is likewise true of the membership of the modern Democratic Party itself: members are special interests first, and Democrats only second. In that sense, fragmentation is the “natural manure” of the Democratic Party, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson.

They’ve buttered their bread, and now they have to sleep in it. This political pointillism, more than any other defect of the Democratic Party, will keep them out of power in this country for the forseeable future.

Read the whole thing at Big Lizards, which you should be reading every day.