For Democrats It's Still 1974

Paul Mirengoff over @ Powerline has an excellent post entitled Forever Young that discusses how the Democrat Party has internalized the "lessons" of Vietnam and now tries to project those lessons into the debate on the Iraq War. He writes,

Liberals look at Iraq, "torture," and now domestic spying, and can taste full public vindication. And therein lies their problem. If Iraq is Vietnam, it will soon enough confer great political advantage on the Democrats. But the Democrats (Hillary Clinton aside) are psychologically incapable, after so long in the wildnerness, of "letting the game come to them." Or perhaps they understand that Iraq is not Vietnam. Thus, they overreach -- being too quick to compare Iraq to Vietnam, to eager to insist that we are failing there, and too quick to cry foul over domestic spying that targets mass murderers, not Larry O'Brien and Daniel Ellsberg. And the public recoils.

It's not surprising that the failure of many liberals to have learned anything truly new since 1974 constitutes a huge political disadvantage. But I'm fascinated by the ways in which this failure continues to confound them.