Shorter Jacob Weisberg*:

However bad the war may be, don't punish its cheerleaders.

There is something truly pathetic about anyone having to use the George McGovern card on a 21st Century election. Putting aside the fact that you can't use a thirty-year old election to predict anything about what will happen this year, or in 2008 or 2010, no more than one could have plausibly attacked FDR and the New Deal in the 1932 Election simply because William Jennings Bryan had failed running on a similar platform in 1896. As Mark Schmitt pointed out earlier this week, the post-McGovern Democratic Party had to battle the notion not just that they were too dovish, but the fact that American involvement in Vietnam had been started by Democrats. Anti-war Democrats may have been distrusted by the public at-large, but it was the party hawks, the Scoop Jackson/Hubert Humphrey wing of the party, that were completely discredited by the disaster in Vietnam.

Obviously, the ongoing debacle in the Persian Gulf cannot be tied to the party that has been out of power this decade. One can hardly say that the party doves, those who have always seen this adventure as folly, will be discredited; the public has an annoying tendency of not distrusting people who were right from the start. It will be a long time before any Republican President is going to be able to rally the people behind another discretionary war, notwithstanding the ingrained hawkishness of Americans. More likely, we'll see a resurgence of isolationism within conservative ranks, and the Paleo-Con v. Neo-Con battle will make the party divisions the Democrats sustained after 1968 seem tame indeed.

*with proper credit to Elton Beard, of course.