Bike-Path Democrats

Revisiting DNC Chairman Howard Dean's astonishing campaign revelation that he left the Episcopal church not over a crisis of conscience regarding some matter of doctrine, but because of a dispute about a bike path, Mark Steyn muses:

Perhaps all cultures have their Howard Deans. Perhaps there are Governors of Peshawar who storm out of the Sword of the Infidel Slayer mosque over its refusal to declare a jihad on Jew bike trails. But, for all their talk about thinking globally and acting locally, today's Democrats have a huge problem focusing on the first half of that bumper sticker. In our current existential struggle, the debates on the way forward are between factions of the right: the Bush Doctrine vs "realpolitik", with "assertive nationalism" coming somewhere in between. Proponents of all three worldviews are Republicans. The Democrats appear not to have a dog in this fight. The dog is on the Burlington bike path, where Democrats are busy drafting revisions to the new poop'n'scoop legislation.

Governor Dean's bike-tunnel vision is not an isolated phenomenon. Everywhere you turn Democrats are linking arms and singing their new all-star fundraising anthem "We Aren't The World". John Kerry on the campaign trail: "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America." Al Sharpton at Rosa Parks' funeral: "Where you have a nation respond looking for weapons in Iraq that are not there but can't see a hurricane in Louisiana that is there."

I don't even understand that last one: We should wait till the WMD are in Louisiana where we can see 'em -- or at least the crater they left? You can still glimpse the remnants of the internationalist left on their fading T-shirts -- Fidel, Che, Mao, Allende, the Sandinistas. And admittedly today's global celebrities are a tougher sell -- Saddam, Mullah Omar, Kim Jong-Il, miscellaneous clitorectomy enthusiasts in West Africa, etc. But even so the left's retreat to hicksville is impressive: the western progressive has ideologically downsized and relocated to a remodeled farmhouse outside Montpelier.